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| DiCaprio |
Spotlight took home the best
picture Oscar with Mad Max: Fury Road picking up six accolades, the most awards
of the night.
It took DiCaprio five tries and
23 years and to win the coveted trophy. In the past he had been nominated for
best actor in Titanic, The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street. And
when he took the Best Actor Academy Award last night, Twitter almost went into
a meltdown as fans heaved a collective sigh of relief.
DiCaprio’s win for The
Revenant generated more than 440,000 tweets per minute, the social media
site said this morning. That makes it the most-tweeted minute of
an Oscars telecast ever.
The Revenant won three of the 12
awards for which it was nominated. Apart from best actor, the film also picked
up the statuettes for best director for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu — his second
in a row — as well as for best cinematography.
The ceremony had
been boycotted by some Hollywood personalities who protested the lack
of ethnic diversity among this year's nominees. All 20 nominees in the best
acting or supporting acting categories are white and an angry social media
backlash under the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has grabbed the awards season
headlines.
Predictably, the night was
overshadowed by the simmering race row, and host Chris Rock – who is black –
delivered a series of sarcastic jokes targeting the Academy’s overwhelmingly
white male membership.
“Well, I’m here at the Academy
Awards — otherwise known as the white People’s Choice awards,” joked Rock who
hosted the show despite calls for him to join the boycott.
“You realize if they nominated hosts,
I wouldn’t even get this job. Y'all would be watching Neil Patrick Harris right
now."
DiCaprio thanked filmmaker Martin
Scorsese, with whom he has collaborated in five films. He also thanked a host
of other people who have helped him in long and accomplished his career. Then
he delved into his passion — climate change.
“Climate change is real. It is
happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species and
we need to work together and stop procrastinating,” DiCaprio said to applause.
A
dedicated environmentalist, DiCaprio has received praise from environmental
groups for his activism. In 2014, he was appointed as a United
Nations representative on climate change.
Some fans took notice of a photo
from the ceremony that appears to show DiCaprio subtly showing his middle
finger to the crowd. The
image quickly started getting reblogged on Tumblr. And many people who noticed
it made jokes about the Academy for making DiCaprio wait over 20 years
for his first Oscar win.
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