Lupita Wins Oscar

 

12 Years a Slave star Lupita Nyong’o won her first-ever Academy Award on Sunday night for her first-ever big screen role, and the significance of the win – nor the significance of the film for which she picked up her trophy – were not lost on the Kenyan starlet.
“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s,” the 31-year-old actress said, accepting her Academy Award through tears.
Nyong’o, who played the slave Patsy in Steve McQueen’s film about Solomon Northop, a free African-American man who was captured and enslaved for 12 years in the mid-1800s, thanked McQueen for his dedication to the film, telling the director that  “you charge everything you fashion with the breath of your own spirit.”
“Thank you so much for putting me in this position,” she went on.
The actress also thanked star Chiwetel Ejiofore, who played Northop, for his fearlessness, and saluted the star for “how deeply you went into telling Solomon’s story.”