‘Spotlight’ wins Oscar for best picture

It did, of course, but it wasn’t alone.

The Academy Awards, normally decorous and predictable, are this year charged with enough politics and uncertainty to rival an election debate.

DiCaprio said while speaking to reporters after his win, “I feel very honoured, to share this has been an incredible experience, to sit there and talk about the film”.

His acceptance speech was particularly noteworthy for his closing comments on the reality of climate change and its visible effects seen throughout 2015 and so far in 2016 citing it as the “the most urgent threat facing our entire species”. “That is the power of film”.

Since its list of nominees was unveiled in January, the Academy has been criticized for its failure to nominate a single minority actor for the second year in a row.

Rock’s hosting is only one of the big stories going into Sunday’s show.

Hollywood heartthrob DiCaprio beat Eddie Redmayne, Bryan Cranston, Matt Damon and Michael Fassbender to take home the best actor gong for his role in The Revenant at the 88th Academy Awards.

Leonardo DiCaprio has finally won an Oscar for his leading role in “The Revenant”, but the memes have not stopped.

The night’s most-awarded film, however, went to neither “Spotlight” nor “The Revenant”.

Earlier, Oscar-winning “Mad Max: Fury Road” sound editor Mark Mangini dropped an F-bomb before his speech, making for two censored moments this year.

Last year, Inarritu took home the best director Oscar for “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” and his film also won the best picture award. He also won a Golden Globe. Director Asif Kapadia’s moving Amy Winehouse documentary Amy was named Best Documentary Feature, while singer Sam Smith won Best Original Song for his Bond theme, “Writing’s on the Wall”. It was for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”.

But the wins at times felt secondary to the unflinching host. “Climate change is real it is happening right now”.

Sharpton addressed a group of several dozen protesters near the Dolby Theatre where the Oscars were being handed out on Sunday evening.

The nominees restored the hashtag “OscarsSoWhite” to prominence and led Spike Lee (an honorary Oscar victor this year) and Jada Pinkett Smith to announce that they wouldn’t attend the show.

Backstage, the actor was asked about the pre-Oscar support for him, including on social media.

Rock also sought to add perspective to the turmoil. That pretty much decimated the previous record, which was set in 2014, when Ellen DeGeneres hosted and she took her infamous Oscar selfie, which generated 225,000 Twitter per minute (Don’t worry Ellen, you still hold the record for most Tweeted photo, with over 3.3 million).