Oscars 2016: Leonardo DiCaprio Reacts to Standing Ovation
The actor and his "The Revenant" director were both Academy Award winners.
— -- When Leonardo DiCaprio took to the stage Sunday night to accept the Academy Award for his performance in “The Revenant,” the first-time winner received something not all winners do: a standing ovation.
“I was very moved,” DiCaprio, 41, told “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts backstage at the Dolby Theatre.
“He deserved it,” added Alejandro González Iñárritu, the man who directed DiCaprio in “The Revenant."
Iñárritu took home the Best Director Oscar for "The Revenant" on Sunday night. Iñárritu's second Best Director Oscar win in a row marks the first time that has happened since 1950.
“I'm just here maybe as an accident, I guess,” Iñárritu said of the honor. “I'm just so happy and so honored, you know.”
The Mexican director-screenwriter, 52, received praise from DiCaprio for creating such a "unique" movie-making process with “The Revenant." In the film, DiCaprio portrays the real-life frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was attacked by a bear then left in the wilderness, trekking about 200 miles to find the men who deserted him.
"The Revenant" led in Oscar nominations this year with 12.
“We literally rehearsed for two weeks just for the opening sequence of this movie,” DiCaprio told Roberts. “It was so unique it in its approach.”
“But more than that, you know, as an actor your dream is to be able to collaborate with the director you work with and actually onsite transform the film into something even more profound,” he said. “I feel that is what the movie became to me.”
DiCaprio’s Best Actor win for “The Revenant” also struck a chord with viewers. Twitter announced the star created the most-tweeted minute ever during an Oscars telecast, overtaking even the famous group selfie tweeted by Ellen DeGeneres in 2014.
Twitter reported there were more than 440,000 tweets per minute posted when DiCaprio accepted his Oscar.
DiCaprio used the high-profile moment to talk about a cause near to his heart, climate change.
“Simultaneously, while I was doing this movie, I did a film, I've been doing a documentary for two years about climate change,” DiCaprio told Roberts. “As I said in the speech, it is the most urgent crisis that we've ever faced as a civilization and the more people that talk about this and get involved and, as I said, vote for leaders who really want to make a difference, you know, we can actually tackle this problem.
“We have the capacity to go 100 percent renewable using existing technologies, we just have to have the political will,” he added. “Our very existence is at stake.”