'It's not golden, but it's real': Sean Penn gifted makeshift Oscar after skipping ceremony

No Oscars statuette? No problem.

Despite being notably absent from the titular awards ceremony this year, the recipient of the Best Supporting Actor honour is still walking away with hardware in hand.

Sean Penn, 65, who missed the 98th Academy Awards due to ongoing work in Ukraine, was gifted a makeshift statuette fashioned from war-damaged rail metal in lieu of the real thing.

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In a video posted by Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, the CEO of Ukrainian Railways, Pertsovskyi tells Penn: "You're missing Oscars ... So we made this one. This is from the railcar that was damaged by the Russians".

"The metal survived, so we put some words here. Very special to us. It's not golden, but it's real. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you."

Watch the video above.

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The Oscar-shaped piece featured a touching inscription welded into the back, which read "this steel once carried millions of people away from war. Then a Russian missile came."

"We did not melt it into a weapon. We forged it into gratitude – for you."

"For your talent. For your courage to stand with Ukraine," the heartfelt inscription finished.

A longtime advocate for Ukraine, Penn has visited several times since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of the country four years ago.

During one such visit in 2022, the One Battle After Another star went as far as gifting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy one of his Oscars, promising to leave it in Kyiv until the country's victory in the war.

Several months before lending the statuette, he threatened to melt both of the awards he'd previously won if the Academy didn't allow the president – who had expressed interest in addressing the ceremony – to speak.

The Academy declined, and while Penn never got around to melting them, he made the decision to put one on loan.

His most recent visit comes amid rumours that the star is working on a project documenting the war in Ukraine, after Zelenskyy posted a photo to social media platform X meeting with the star.

The photo, posted a day after the Oscars, was captioned "Sean, thanks to you, we know what a true friend of Ukraine is."

"You have stood with Ukraine since the first day of the full-scale war... We know that you will continue to stand with our country and our people."

This latest ceremony brought about Penn's third Oscar win – but the famously gruff star was a noticeable no-show at the event.

Despite taking out the Best Supporting Actor category for his role in action thriller One Battle After Another, last year's winner Kieran Culkin was left to accept the award on his behalf.

"Sean Penn couldn't be here this evening, or didn't want to, so I will be accepting the award on his behalf," Culkin, quipped to laughs from the crowd.

Culkin alluded, of course, to Penn's well-documented aversion to awards shows.

He skipped this year's BAFTAs and Actor Awards, despite being nominated for and winning both, and has previously expressed his opposition to award shows.

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