The red room in the auction house was filled with beautiful antique furniture, but the sunshine-bright color of the statue standing in a corner overshadowed it all.
The life-size figure stood there like a sentry, taller than anything else in the room. It had a softly chiseled face and held a sword carved into its body and pointed toward the floor. It had Art Deco lines and a sleek appearance. The figure felt very familiar to me but I couldn’t place it. Where had I seen that image before?
The statue wore bikini briefs, which reminded me of a superhero – one of those Marvel action figures that of late have moved from comic-book pages to the movie screen. But it wasn’t one of them.
Then it hit me: It looked like the Oscar statuette. How could I have not instantly recognized the symbol, since the Academy Awards were held only a week ago.
I observed the figure a little closer and saw the signs that resembled the Oscar: the face, although the features were not as sharply cut. The hands clutching the hilt of the sword, one above the other. The sword pointed downward. The chest, though, was different, with the figure’s breast more human.
Someone – the consignor – apparently had wanted their own Oscar, but one whose eyes they could look into and a color they couldn’t miss. Seeing the figure there made me wonder who that person was.
The real Oscar statuette came into being in the late 1920s after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences met to decide how best to honor those who had achieved excellence in movie-making and how to signify it with a trophy, according to the academy website. The art director at MGM Studios, Cedric Gibbons (who also created his own Art Deco home), came up with a design of a knight holding a crusader’s sword and standing on a reel of film. The story is that Mexican actor and director Emilio Fernandez posed for the design, but there are questions about its validity. Los Angeles sculptor George Stanley created a three-dimensional statuette based on the design.
The first statuette was awarded on May 16, 1929, to best actor Emil Jannings for his performances in two movies, “The Last Command” and “The Way of All Flesh.”
It’s not clear how the statuette got the name Oscar, but the story is that the academy librarian, upon seeing it for the first time, said it resembled her Uncle Oscar. The academy officially adopted the name in 1939.
If you’d like to own your own replica of the statuette, you can find them for sale on the web, especially on eBay. The academy, however, frowns on those replicas. Last month, it sued a Texas man who allegedly sold what the academy called “counterfeit replica” on eBay (for $850) and Etsy (for $5,000).
As for the statue at auction, it was not ready for sale that day. Like the furniture in the room, its time would come another day.
