The director of 'OJ: Made in America' turned the Oscars spotlight on to police brutality

In a short, poignant acceptance speech, Ezra Edelman paid tribute to victims of police violence and police brutality on the same day that Trayvon Martin lost his life five years ago.

Edelman won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his sweeping documentary, OJ: Made in America. The film is monumental for its sheer length (clocking in at just under eight hours) but also for its and scope.

The film centers on O.J. Simpson and the brutal double murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, but it also shows in painstaking detail the racial politics circling around the trial: the racist history of the LAPD, the Rodney King beating, and the LA riots, and how they were inseparable from the not-guilty verdict that was eventually delivered.

So it’s only natural that Edelman, who is the son of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, would pay equal tribute to Brown, Goldman, and the victims of police brutality.