‘Icarus’ Wins Oscar for Best Documentary Feature

“Icarus” took home top honors at the 2018 Academy Awards, winning the trophy for Best Documentary Feature. Director Bryan Fogel accepted the award, along with producer Dan Cogan. This marks the first Oscar win and nomination for Fogel, previously best known as a playwright for the comedy “Jewtopia.” It is also the first win for Cogan, who previously served as executive producer for David France’s Oscar-nominated AIDS documentary “How to Survive a Plague.”

“We dedicate this award to Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, our fearless whistleblower who now lives in grave danger,” Fogel said, accepting the award. “We hope ‘Icarus’ is a wake-up call — yes, about Russia — but more than that, about the importance of telling the truth.”

“Icarus” beat out fellow nominees “Faces Places” (Agnès Varda and JR), “Last Men in Aleppo” (Feras Fayyad), “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (Steve James), and “Strong Island” (Yance Ford). The film follows Fogel as he sets out on a mission to learn about performance-enhancing drugs in sports. With the help of a renegade Russian scientist, Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, he ends up discovering a major international doping scandal that leads all the way to a decades-long cover-up by the Russian government.

The 2018 Academy Awards took place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood with Jimmy Kimmel hosting for the second year in a row.