I find the whole Academy Award thing completely useless. Who cares about something irrelevant as Academy Awards. The only important thing is the current and future audience, for which these films should be preserved.
If you had won one and then had the reason you won it for erased you might feel differently.
First, in general I think Academy Awards are irrelevant crap.
Second, I feel that the audience is far more important than the creators. If someone winning some worthless award was the main reason to release the originals, I would not care one bit. But since it comes to preserving the art for current and future generations, it is a completely different story.