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Oscars: DiCaprio finally wins, 'Spotlight' takes best picture

Finally, he really is “King of the World!”

Leonardo DiCaprio won his first best actor Oscar Sunday night in Hollywood in “The Revenant,” which was favored to win best picture but lost to “Spotlight,” the story of The Boston Globe reporters who uncovered an international cover-up of sex crimes committed by Catholic priests against minors.

Brie Larson won her first best actress award as a young mother held captive for seven years in “Room.”

“The Revenant” director Alejandro G. Inarritu also made Oscar history by becoming only the third person to earn back-to-back best director Oscars following John Ford (1940 and 1941) and Joseph Mankiewicz (1949 and 1950). Inarritu won best director last year for “Birdman.”

Mark Rylance staged a major upset by winning the best supporting actor Oscar over heavily favored Sylvester Stallone, reprising his iconic role of Rocky Balboa in “Creed.” Rylance played a Russian spy in Steven Spielberg's Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies.”

“It's a great time to be an actor!” he said in his acceptance speech.

Alicia Vikander won best supporting actress in the fact-based drama “The Danish Girl.”

The original screenplay Oscar went to Tom McCarthy's “Spotlight.” The adapted screenplay Oscar went to Adam McKay's “The Big Short,” a fact-based comedy about the mortgage market meltdown of 2008 and the few men who saw it coming.

“The Revenant” won best cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, who also won last year for “Birdman.”

A former teen star, DiCaprio became a mega heartthrob as the guy who stood on the Titanic deck and proclaimed “I'm the king of the world!” He did not receive a nomination that year. Yet he has earned a total of four best actor nominations, one supporting actor nod (“What's Eating Gilbert Grape?”) and a best picture nom (as producer of “The Wolf of Wall Street”).

Meanwhile, Chris Rocked it!

Rock, the controversial black comedian hosting the ceremony, skated on a fine line between insightful and anger, addressing the #OscarsSoWhite campaign criticizing the Academy failure to nominate a single minority for the performance categories.

“This is the 88th Academy Awards, which means this no-black-nominees thing has happened at least 71 times before,” he told an appreciative and polite audience. “We didn't protest the Oscars in the '50s and '60s, because we had real things to protest.

“We were too concerned about being raped or lynched to worry about who won best cinematographer. When your grandma is swinging from a tree, it's really hard to care about the best documentary foreign short.”

One of the biggest events of the night was Italian composer Ennio Morricone, 87, winning his first competitive Oscar for his score to Quentin Tarantino's “Hateful Eight.” Morricone has scored more than 400 films, including “The Untouchables,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Mission” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”

The Academy's grand experiment of saving time during acceptance speeches by placing additional thank-yous as a rolling scroll at the bottom of the screen proved to be a bust. It moved too quickly to actually read well, then some of the winners (Alicia Vikander, for instance) went ahead and mentioned the same names anyway.

Images: 88th Annual Oscars

Full list of Sunday's Oscar winners

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