Press Release:
Beverly Hills, CA — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has examined the Oscar® statuette that was scheduled to be sold at an Internet auction on August 16 and declared it a "high-quality counterfeit." Auctioneers Mastro Auctions, who brought the statuette to the Academy on Thursday so that its authenticity could be confirmed or disproved, has announced that it is cancelling the sale of the item.
The proposed sale of the statuette, which was purported to be the award presented to Leo McCarey in 1944 for his direction of that year's Best Picture Going My Way, had been widely covered in the press. Those reports came as a considerable surprise to McCarey's daughter, Mary McCarey Washburn, who called the Academy to point out that all three of the statuettes that her father had won during his career were sitting safely on her mantel.
That information was relayed to the auction house, which then asked the Academy to examine the Oscar. Academy executive administrator Ric Robertson reported that a group of Academy experts had closely studied the award and had found it to be made up of two mismatched parts, neither of which was ever a part of the authentic McCarey award. The lower section is an authentic Academy Award base with its original identifying plate pried off and replaced with a far more recent plate inaccurately identifying the statuette as the 1944 Directing award. The statuette proper, Robertson said, was a close copy of an Oscar but weighed a full pound more than an authentic one and differed from a genuine Oscar in three key additional respects.
Robertson said that there were indications that the individual who consigned the statuette to the auctioneers may have himself been misled at the time he acquired it. He said the Academy would attempt to identify those who had unlawfully reproduced its copyrighted award, and that it would pursue its legal options if those efforts were successful.