oscar winners 2016

Oscars 2016: 4 winners and 3 losers from the 88th Academy Awards

Spotlight wins the big prize, but Mad Max wins the most awards.

Acting winners Mark Rylance (left), Brie Larson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and

 Alicia Vikander celebrate backstage

The 2016 Oscars were a weird roller coaster ride of expectations.

The movie that won the night's first award, Best Original Screenplay,

 bookended the evening by also winning Best Picture —

 but those were the only two prizes it won.

In between, a post-apocalyptic action spectacular cleaned up, an R-rated art film 

won three high-profile awards, and host Chris Rock kept the focus squarely 

on the Oscars' diversity (or lack thereof). Naturally, the ceremony was

 not without controversy, but said controversy didn't always 

come from the direction you'd expect.

It was as wild and well-produced a telecast as any in recent memory,

 with clips packages that actually explained the awards they introduced

 and a surprising run of really good speeches. There were winners 

both unexpected and very expected, and only a couple of cringe-worthy moments.

You can read a full list of winners here. But some films won bigger

 than others — and that's what we're here for. Here are four winners 

and three losers from the 88th annual Academy Awards.

Winner: Spotlight takes home the night's biggest prize

The team behind Spotlight accepts the Oscar for Best Picture.

Spotlight won only two Oscars, but they were both big ones. 

The night's first prize, for Best Original Screenplay, went to 

screenwriters Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy (who also directed the film), 

and then Spotlight lost the next four awards it was nominated for.

Heading into Best Picture — the last award of the night —

 the odds were not in Spotlight's favor. The last time a movie won Best Picture

 and only one other award was in March 1953, when The Greatest Show on Earth 

 took home Best Picture and Best Story (coincidentally enough,

 another screenwriting prize) at the 25th annual awards.

Since then, the floor for Best Picture winners has been three total awards

. (The most recent Best Picture winner to win only three 

awards total was 12 Years a Slave, in 2014.)

But Spotlight broke through to win the biggest prize of them all

, in a result that seemed to shock even producer Michael Sugar, 

who accepted the award. He rattled off a few words about holding

 the Catholic Church accountable for the sexual abuse of children,

 then wrapped up the night.

RelatedWhy Spotlight did — and didn't — deserve to win Best Picture

Spotlight's win is the result of many things — the way the Oscars choose Best Picture, the film's important subject matter, nostalgia for journalism, etc. — but chief among them is distributor Open Road Films, a tiny studio that made sure Oscar voters saw the film early, and then kept it in the conversation.

After Spotlight won the Screen Actors Guild ensemble cast award, Mark Ruffalodelivered a speech in which he declared that to support Spotlight was to support allforms of fighting against systemic injustice — not just sex abuse in the Catholic church. That central campaign narrative took hold, and Spotlight rode it all the way to the win.

The Oscar rarely goes to the absolute best movie; it much more frequently goes to the film with the best narrative. And that turned out to be Spotlight in this very confused year. (It certainly didn't hurt that Spotlight was also a very good movie, in the classicist style the Oscars generally prefer.)

Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road nabs the most trophies

Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road nabs the most trophies

Photo by mahi dewli

Film Editing winner Margaret Sixel strides offstage after her speech for Mad Max: Fury Road.

There had been some speculation that The Revenant, which was nominated for 12 awards, might box Mad Max: Fury Road out of most of the technical categories. Consequently, many critics (including me) divided their predictions for the technical categories between the two films.

Such a split was not to be. Mad Max didn't make a dent in the top categories, and it unexpectedly lost Visual Effects (to Ex Machina — surely the lowest-budgeted Visual Effects winner of the CGI era). But it rattled off wins in Costume Design, Film Editing, Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing, for a total of six trophies. Not bad for a movie that as recently as December was considered a long shot even for nominations.

Sure, Mad Max didn't win any of the big prizes, but with its strong showing, solid global box office, and beloved status among film fans, the movie seems likely to sail along into history as an action movie classic. That's hugely unexpected for the fourth film in a franchise that hadn't seen a new movie in 30 years until Fury Road was released.

Winner: Small distributors win big

Brie Larson, Oscar winner for A24's Room, celebrates with her award. @ mahi dewli

One of the big questions of the 2016 Oscars was whether tiny, untested indie distributors like Open Road and A24 could convert critical passion for their films into Oscar gold. It's usually difficult for smaller distributors to crack the Oscar game on their first try, as we saw in 2015 when IFC faded down the stretch with Boyhood, which went from frontrunner to also-ran.

But Open Road and A24 both saw substantial success. Open Road's Spotlight nabbed those two big awards, and A24 did just as well, winning Best Actress with Room's Brie Larson (who very quietly remained a frontrunner all awards season long, yet never wore out her welcome), Documentary Feature with Amy, and Visual Effects with Ex Machina.

However, the two studios' most impressive feat is that they each went head to head with 20th Century Fox — a dominant Oscar player with significant contenders in The Revenantand Brooklyn's Saoirse Ronan — and won.