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'Spotlight' Wins Best Picture At 2016 Academy Awards

Spotlight won the coveted Oscar for best picture when the 88th Academy Awards were handed out Sunday night in Hollywood, upsetting The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road, which entered the night with 12 and 10 nominations, respectively.

Mad Max: Fury Road just about swept the early categories, winning six Oscars, but The Revenant also took two of the top awards. Alejandro González Iñárritu won the prize for best director, giving him his second consecutive Oscar, and Leonardo DiCaprio won the Oscar for best actor in a leading role, his first.

Brie Larson won her first Oscar, taking the award for best leading actress, for her role in Room. Best supporting actress went to Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl, and best supporting actor was won by Mark Rylance for his role in Bridge of Spies.

Our Pop Culture Happy Hour team of Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson and Bob Mondello live-tweeted all the proceedings — from the red carpet to host Chris Rock's opening monologue, until the last winner was called.

Our crew tweeted using the hashtag #NPROscars and also retweeted some of your contributions. You can review via the widget below, or right here on Twitter.

This year's event is not without some controversy. When the nominations were announced on Jan. 14, several media outlets reported a lack of diversity among the nominees. Some celebrities even called for viewers to boycott Sunday's airing of the Academy Awards, and the overall outrage over the exclusion of people of color got the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trending on Twitter.

These reactions ultimately led the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make modifications to its voting process and declare, "The Board's goal is to commit to doubling the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020."

Host Chris Rock didn't shy away from commenting on the issue in his opening monologue. He joked that the Oscars are otherwise known as "the white people's choice awards" and said that if hosts were nominated, he wouldn't have gotten the job — that it would have instead gone to Neil Patrick Harris.

In the list below, we've marked the winners in each category, in bold.


Categories

Picture

The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Spotlight

Actor in a Leading Role

Bryan Cranston, Trumbo
Matt Damon, The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant
Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl

Actress in a Leading Role

Cate Blanchett, Carol
Brie Larson, Room
Jennifer Lawrence, Joy
Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn

Director

Adam McKay, The Big Short
George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road
Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant
Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Tom McCarthy, Spotlight

Actor in a Supporting Role

Christian Bale, The Big Short
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone, Creed

Actress in a Supporting Role

Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Rooney Mara, Carol
Rachel McAdams, Spotlight
Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl
Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs

Animated Feature Film

Anomalisa
Boy and the World
Inside Out
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There

Cinematography

Carol
The Hateful Eight
Mad Max: Fury RoadThe Revenant
Sicario

Costume Design

Carol
Cinderella
The Danish Girl
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant

Documentary (Feature)

Amy
Cartel Land
The Look of Silence
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom

Documentary (Short Subject)

Body Team 12
Chau, beyond the Lines
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the ShoahA Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
Last Day of Freedom

Film Editing

The Big Short
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Revenant
Spotlight
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Foreign Language Film

Embrace of the Serpent
Mustang
Son of Saul
Theeb
A War

Makeup and Hairstyling

Mad Max: Fury Road
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out
the Window and Disappeared
The Revenant

Original Score

Bridge of Spies
Carol
The Hateful Eight
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Original Song

"Earned It," Fifty Shades of Grey
"Manta Ray," Racing Extinction
"Simple Song #3," Youth
"Til It Happens to You," The Hunting Ground
"Writing's on the Wall," Spectre

Production Design

Bridge of Spies
The Danish Girl
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant

Short Film (Animated)

Bear Story
Prologue
Sanjay's Super Team
We Can't Live without Cosmos
World of Tomorrow

Short Film (Live-Action)

Ave Maria
Day One
Everything Will Be Okay (Alles Wird Gut)
Shok
Stutterer

Sound Editing

Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Sicario
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Sound Mixing

Bridge of Spies
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Visual Effects

Ex Machina
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

The Big Short
Brooklyn
Carol
The Martian
Room

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Bridge of Spies
Ex Machina
Inside Out
Spotlight
Straight Outta Compton

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: February 28, 2016 at 7:00 PM HST
A previous version of this story said that Mad Max: Fury Road won seven Oscars. It won six.
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