AFTER FIRES, A PHOENIX OSCAR RISES

Two award winners lost everything last year, but when statuettes get damaged there is a solution

- BY JOSH ROTTENBERG

WHEN last year's wildfires forced Colleen Atwood to evacuate her home in Pacific Palisades, the Oscar-winning costume designer grabbed a few photographs, gathered her pets and left. She didn't spend much time deciding what to take. She couldn't imagine that her house on Aderno Way, where she'd lived for more than 30 years, would burn.

"I had to do a runner," Atwood jokes, describing her hurried exit on a recent morning phone call from Australia, where she's been working on Tom Hanks' World War II drama "Greyhound 2." "I didn't really believe it was real." What she didn't grab were her Academy Awards she had earned over the course of her career. One of the four Oscars — her first, for the 2002 musical "Chicago" — was safely on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. But the other three, for "Memoirs of a Geisha" (2005), "Alice in Wonderland" (2010) and "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" (2016), had been sitting on a bookshelf in a work area just off the dining room.

When Atwood was finally allowed back onto the property, almost nothing remained. She and an assistant picked through the rubble, searching for anything that might have survived the devastating fires that destroyed more than 6,800 structures in the Palisades, Topanga and Malibu. Her three BAFTAs and two Emmys were gone, along with her Disney Legend award. Two of the Oscars had melted entirely, but one of the statuettes had endured — just barely. The gold-plated figure she'd won for "Fantastic Beasts" was warped and blackened by heat, its surface blistered and twisted like something pulled from a furnace. Atwood gave the damaged trophy a nickname: "my crispy critter."