US Edition 
Spotlight shocks by winning Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards
Spotlight, the drama about a newspaper investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church, has beat out Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant by winning top prize at the 2016 Academy Awards
In a shock result, Spotlight won the Oscar for Best Picture, beating Room, Mad Max and The Revenant.
The journalism drama, about The Boston Globe's investigation into claims of abuse in the Catholic Church, also won the award for Best Original Screenplay.
•
Morgan Freeman announced the result and held us all in suspense.
It's long been assumed that The Revenant would win the golden trio - Best Actor, Best Director and Best Picture - but thanks to Spotlight, Alejandro González Iñárritu's survivalist thriller only won two out of three.
Spotlight, co-written and directed by Tom McCarthy, was an early Oscar front-runner since screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in October. Our reviewer, Tim Robey, said of the movie: "Spotlight is a journalism procedural thriller in which the thrills and procedure are one and the same thing.
The excitement comes from the joining of disparate dots: a stray comment leads to a tentative telephone call, which leads in turn to a halting conversation in a coffee shop. Some of these leads are yet more dots, while others are the lines that link them – and over the course of two hours, you watch the bigger picture gradually and methodically take shape.
"The picture in this case is the systematic concealment by the Catholic Church in Boston of its decades-long, state-wide dealings with almost 100 paedophile priests – and McCarthy’s film, a serious Best Picture contender at this year’s Oscars and Baftas, follows four reporters on the city’s Globe newspaper who spent two years painstakingly pinning down the story.
"Both visually and verbally, Thomas McCarthy’s film is almost obstinately unshowy: Aaron Sorkin would probably nod off during the prologue. But much like All The President’s Men – which is, of course, a significant and unavoidable influence – Spotlight finds a thrilling and absorbing anti-glamour in journalistic spadework, and the tactile movement of analogue information through filing cabinets and photocopiers."
Ruffalo and director Tom McCarthy joined a group of about 20 people protesting sex abuse in the Catholic Church outside Los Angeles' downtown cathedral, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The rally was one of several nationwide organised by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
Many have hailed Spotlight's win as a victory for journalism.
Spotlight is the first journalism-themed movie movie to win Best Picture in 70 years, the last being 1947's Gentleman's Agreement, which starred Gregory Peck as a reporter exposing anti-Semitism.