Who Owns Mary Pickford's Oscar?

It's a thorny dilemma, both legally and morally -- fittingly, the kind of story that, were it turned into a movie, might win a couple Oscars itself. The question is this: Does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have the legal right to buy back an Oscar winner's statuette if he or she (or his or her heirs) decides to get rid of it? What if the Oscar winner wants to sell it at auction and donate the money to charity? Can the Academy in good conscience demand return of the statuette and deprive the charity of those funds? See? Thorny!

For Academy Award winners since 1950, the legalities are fairly uncomplicated. The minute you win the sucker, you have to sign a contract saying that if you or your heirs ever decide you don't want the trophy anymore, the Academy has the right to buy it back for $10. That's the Academy's way of preventing the devaluation of the statuette. If any old schmo with a few hundred thousand dollars could "win" an Oscar at Jack Nicholson's garage sale, the prize would lose all meaning. As it is, of course, winning an Oscar is the single greatest achievement that a human being can ever hope to accomplish -- and the Academy wants to keep it that way.

The issue that's about to go before a Los Angeles judge and jury is what should happen to the best actress Oscar that Mary Pickford won for 1929's Coquette. (That's Pickford and the troublesome trophy in the picture.) The Academy didn't have the first-dibs rule back then -- but when Pickford won an honorary Oscar in 1976, she signed the agreement, and the Academy says that contract was retroactive to include her earlier trophy, too.

When Pickford died in 1979, her Oscars became the property of her husband, Buddy Rogers. Then he died in 1999, and everything went to his second wife, Beverly Rogers. The trouble started when she died, in 2007, and her will said Pickford's 1930 Oscar was to be sold at auction and the money donated to a couple of specific charities. (Pickford's honorary Oscar stays with the estate.) The Academy says no; Beverly Rogers' will says yes. The executor of her estate is obligated to carry out her wishes; the Academy feels duty-bound to prevent it.

The Rogers estate reckons the Oscar could earn several hundred thousand dollars: Pickford was a huge star, as well as a founding member of United Artists and the Academy itself, and this Oscar was the first one ever given for a performance in a "talkie." Instead, the estate and the Academy will have to spend loads of money on legal fees.

For its part, the Academy offered to donate a couple hundred thousand dollars to the specified charities if Rogers' estate would turn over the statuette. The estate demanded $500,000, though, and the Academy balked.

Then the plot thickens. Remember how Pickford signed the contract when she picked up her 1976 honorary Oscar, and how the Academy says it's retroactive? Well, Beverly Rogers' estate claims Pickford never actually signed that contract! (Dun-dun-DUN!) They've got handwriting experts prepared to testify that it ain't Pickford's signature on the document. The Academy says it's irrelevant, since receiving the trophy was an indication in itself that the winner was willing to enter into the agreement. Still, it complicates matters -- especially since, according to some accounts, even if Pickford did sign the agreement in 1976, she was enfeebled by age and not entirely in her right mind anyway.

Not that it matters what we think, but what do you think? Even if the court rules that the Academy has the right to take back Pickford's statuette, should they do it? What about those charities that Rogers wanted the money to go to? Should they suffer because of Academy rules? On the other hand, shouldn't Rogers have known in the first place that such a stipulation in her will would go against the previous arrangement? Who's right here? Or is everyone equally wrong?