As the week after the Oscars winds down, it’s a good time for a story about how the memories may last but the statues are crap. Juliet Binoche says she let her three year-old son play with her Oscar soon after she received it in 1996 for best supporting actress in The English Patient with randy Ralph Fiennes.

She says her son peeled all the gold off the statue but that the Academy graciously replaced it:

When I first brought it [the Oscar] home, I wanted to share my award, so I let my [then] three-year-old son play with it. After a few days, it started peeling until it was all naked - there was no gold left. It made me a little sad, but I couldn’t stop smiling and thinking about how it is all illusion. Though it was kindly replaced by the Acadamy, it made me realize that the real award is what you keep inside you.

[From In Style British print edition, March 2007]

I love how she gets all philosophical about her Oscar peeling and uses it as an example of the fleeting aspects of fame. She probably just wanted her toddler to stop screaming for it and handed it off, sighing and rolling her eyes. I’ve been there.

The article Binoche’s quote appeared in has profiles of several Oscar-winners with pictures of where keep their statues. It includes Liza Minelli, Geena Davis, Sean Connery and Ben Affleck posing where their Oscars are displayed.

Sean Connery keeps his Oscar for best supporting actor for 1987’s The Untouchables in the bathroom of his son’s apartment in New York. It is clustered on glass shelves with other gold and metallic statues and doesn’t stand out.

Geena Davis is shown with her Oscar in her decidedly middle-class looking living room with toys laying around and brown carpeting. She says she keeps it on display next to an award her surgeon husband received. She won a best supporting actress Oscar in 1988 for The Accidental Tourist.

Ben Affleck’s 1997 screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting is at home in his Santa Monica office and sits on a table behind his desk next to a signed Celtic’s basketball and photos of him with Matt Damon at the event.

Liza Minelli’s statue for best actress in Cabarat, 1972, is on the piano of her NY city apartment next to her deceased father’s best director Oscar for 1958’s Gigi. It seems that when well cared for, Oscar statues do last.

Here are the scans from In Touch.