The 90th Academy Awards ceremony was filled with milestones, one of them being the recognition of the first feature-length Netflix Original. While the streaming service picked up its first Oscar last year with the documentary short The White Helmets, this time they managed the bigger deal with Icarus being named Best Documentary Feature. Shorts don’t have the same qualification confines for the Academy Awards as features do, and so Netflix had to allow Icarus a theatrical run.
In a statement via email:
Netflix congratulates Bryan Fogel and Dan Cogan on their Academy Award for the groundbreaking documentary ‘Icarus,’ the first Netflix documentary feature film to win an Oscar. We applaud them, as well as its brave subject Grigory Rodchenkov, for the sacrifices they all made to expose and stand up for the truth.
This year, Netflix saw its sixth and seventh nominations in the feature documentary category, with Icarus also going up agains their own Strong Island. They also saw their third short film contending in the Best Documentary Short category, but that one, Heroin(e) — the deserving winner, in our opinion — lost to Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405.
For the list of all the Academy Award winners, visit Film School Rejects. And for anyone upset that Faces Places lost, see the winners of the 2018 Film Independent Spirit Awards (and the relevant discussion as acceptance speech from Dee Rees on awards qualification rules). Congrats to all.
