After five nominations, zero wins, and a lifetime worth of memes, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his first Oscar on Sunday for his role in “The Revenant.”
DiCaprio earned a standing ovation from the crowd for his hard-earned win and opened his speech by thanking the cast, crew and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, but his speech also included a call to action.
“Climate change is real,” DiCaprio said in a long speech that the producers decided not to cut short. “It is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.”
Explaining that his film was “about man’s relationship to the natural world,” and that production struggled to find an environment cold enough to film in, the actor called on the audience to “stop procrastinating.”
“We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations,” he said. “But who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.