And the Oscar for best Hollywood courtroom drama goes to . . . the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The golden statuette was awarded Monday by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, which ruled that if Mary Pickford's heirs want to sell it, they have to offer it to academy officials for $10 instead of auctioning it off for as much as $800,000.
Academy leaders took a Rancho Mirage woman, her daughter and a cousin to court after the women announced plans to sell the Oscar presented in 1930 to the silent-movie star known as "America's sweetheart" and donate the proceeds to charity.
Marian Stahl, daughter Kim Boyer and Boyer's cousin Virginia Casey are disposing of Pickford's estate, which at one time filled the legendary Beverly Hills estate known as Pickfair.
Along with the best actress Oscar for 1929's silent melodrama "Coquette," the estate also includes an honorary Oscar bestowed upon her in 1976 and a third Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, presented to actor-bandleader Buddy Rogers in 1986.
Rogers married Pickford in 1937 after her divorce from actor Douglas Fairbanks. After Pickford's death in 1979, Rogers married Beverly Rogers. He died in 1999 and she died in 2007, leaving the estate to Stahl, who is her sister, Boyer and Casey.
Jealously guarding the Oscar trademark, the film academy has since 1951 required recipients to sign an agreement giving the group the right of first refusal to buy back any unwanted Oscar for the token price of $10 (though that amount was later reduced to $1).
That has made pre-1951 Oscars a hot commodity. The best picture statuette for 1939's "Gone With the Wind" was purchased for $1.54 million nine years ago by Michael Jackson. The best picture Oscar for 1941's "How Green Was My Valley" sold for $95,000 four years ago.
Because Pickford signed the agreement when her honorary Oscar was presented to her and because she was a founder of the academy who remained a member until her death, academy officials contend that the 1930 Oscar was grandfathered into the rule on right of first refusal.
During an occasionally theatrical two-week downtown trial, an unidentified pair of 1930s-era Oscars were displayed to jurors, and a recent Pickfair estate auction catalog displaying hundreds of Pickford movie memorabilia items was brought to court.
