After winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his film Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Pavel Talankin moved on from facing off against the head of the Russian state to perhaps an even more formidable foe: the TSA.
The drama started on Thursday when Talankin was traveling from New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Frankfurt, Germany. Despite having previously flown with his newly acquired Oscar in his carry-on bag since the ceremony, Talankin was informed by Transportation Security Administration officials at JFK that the most coveted prize in all of moviemaking would need to be checked, as it could be used as a weapon onboard.
As Talankin didn’t have an additional bag to check onto his Lufthansa flight, the TSA provided a cardboard box in which to stow the statuette during its journey in the cargo hold to Germany. But, as the film’s co-director David Borenstein recounted in an Instagram post, the Oscar didn’t turn up at baggage claim.
In the post, Borenstein appealed to Lufthansa to help locate the Oscar, proving that even Academy Award winners have to resort to social media shaming to get a modicum of customer service from an airline. Lufthansa replied in the comments, assured Borenstein that they “take it super serious,” and by Friday, the statuette was located in Frankfurt.
But what would have happened if the Oscar hadn’t turned up?
Talankin’s statuette wasn’t the first Academy Award to go missing, and sadly, others have stayed missing. Vivien Leigh’s Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire was stolen from her home, as was Olympia Dukakis’ for Moonstruck. (Though, hilariously, Dukakis’ Golden Globe was left untouched by the presumably snobby thief.) Both statuettes never turned back up again and were ultimately replaced by the Academy. In Dukakis’s case, the Best Supporting Actress winner reportedly paid $78 for her new Oscar.
After the massive southern California fires of early 2025, at least two Academy Award winners had their statuettes destroyed by the flames. In its story about costume designer Colleen Atwood and production designer Rick Carter receiving new statuettes, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Academy is somewhat secretive about the process of getting replacement Oscars. The official comment from the AMPAS stated that they’ll “repair or replace Oscars belonging to living winners in cases of severe damage or catastrophic loss,” which presumably would have been the case for Talankin.
