***FOR AUCTION: One Oscar, Used, $100,000 OBO; Fabulous Deal!***

By Scott Smith in News on Jul 24, 2006 8:13PM

Your acting skills have not gotten any better since 1st grade when Sister Mary Ignatius said you “made some confusing choices” in your portrayal of a bar of soap in your Catholic grade school production of “Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness (So Scrub Your Back Or You’re Going To Hell).” Therefore, an Oscar is out of the question.

Unless you’ve got $100,000 lying around.

Mastro Auctions in Burr Ridge is going to auction off an Oscar won by Leo McCarey for the 1944 Bing Crosby film Going My Way. The bidding starts at $25,000, but a spokesman for the company expects the statue to go for six figures.

Mastronet offers many items for auction, including fancy pants stuff like Tiffany vases and items that would make this Chicagoist drool, like Steve Ditko’s art from Amazing Spider-Man #31 or an issue of X-Men #95 from 1975.

Incidentally, the Oscars themselves are manufactured here in Chicago by R.S. Owens. So if you’re the big winner of the upcoming auction and you go all butterfingers when you’re showing it off, you can send it to them for repairs. For cleaning, the company recommends you “simply wipe it with a soft dry cloth.” Oscar.com tells us that it takes 12 R.S. Owens employees 20 hours to make just one Oscar. That is one powerful union at work there.