Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave marks milestone in Hollywood history
Best picture Oscar is first for a black director and marks a major milestone in Hollywood history
Hollywood named the brutal, unshrinking historical drama 12 Years a Slave best picture at the 86th annual Academy Awards.
Steve McQueen's epic based on Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir has been hailed as a landmark corrective to the movie industry's long omission of slavery stories, after years of whiter tales like 1940 best picture winner Gone With the Wind.
The British director dedicated the honour to those past sufferers of slavery and "the 21 million who still endure slavery today".
"Everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live. This is the most important legacy of Solomon Northup," McQueen said, before bouncing into the arms of his cast.
A year after celebrating Ben Affleck's Argo over Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opted this time for stark realism over more plainly entertaining candidates like the 3D space marvel Gravity and the 1970s caper American Hustle.
I want to salute the spirit of Patsey for her guidance
Those two films came in as the leading nominee getters. David Russell's American Hustle went home empty-handed, but Gravity triumphed as the night's top award-winner.