The Gone With the Wind Best Picture Oscar has mysteriously vanished from Michael Jackson's estate

Michael Jackson owned a lot of weird stuff, but among his more valuable treasures was the best picture Oscar for 1939's Gone With the Wind, originally given to producer David O. Selznick. However, Jackson's estate now admits they can't find the Oscar anywhere.

Jackson, a movie buff, had bought the statuette in 1999 for $1.54 million — the most ever spent on an Oscar (the Academy has since imposed rules against selling Oscars, but those didn't exist when Gone With the Wind won back in 1940). However, at some point in the confusion that followed Jackson's unexpected death in 2009, the Gone With the Wind Oscar went missing, The Hollywood Reporter writes.

Jackson's estate told THR that they had assumed the valuable statue was kept at Jackson's Neverland estate, or in the Los Angeles home where he was living before he died. However, Jackson's attorney Howard Weitzman confessed, "The estate does not know where the Gone With the Wind statuette is." A family member may have taken it, it could have been misplaced in a storage facility along with some of Jackson's other possessions, or it could have been stolen.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"We would like to have that Oscar because it belongs to Michael's children. I'm hopeful it will turn up at some point," Weitzman said.