Citizenfour: How Oscars gave Snowden the honour America didn't

In the summer of 2013, when Edward Snowden was in Hong Kong he shared his greatest fear with journalist Glenn Greenwald. He said that after he decided to expose the massive surveillance that American spy agency was carrying out on the web users, his greatest fear was that no one would take note of his revelations.

The Academy Awards ceremony on February 22 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles showed that Snowden's fear didn't come true. It also showed that the world has neither forgotten him nor what he revealed. For once, even though it may not prove that big of a deal in grand scheme of things, most people see Snowden as a hero and not a traitor.

This is the key takeaway from the best documentary award for Citizenfour, a film that chronicles what Snowden did, how he did it and, most significantly, why he did it in his own words.

The panellists who judge movies for Oscars mostly stick to political correctness. They don't like films that are overly controversial, especially the ones that show the US government in not-so-good light.

This is what happened with The Act of Killing. This film by Joshua Oppenheimer took a look at the grisly mass murders of more than half a million leftists in the middle of 1960s in Indonesia. It traced back a few people who took part in the killings and, somehow, managed to put them on camera while they willingly, and often with a morbid satisfaction, revealed how they mass murdered people. The whole story was too grim and then there was subtle of how Western democracies didn't do enough to prevent the killings because it was the era of Cold War and dead leftists were supposedly a desirable thing.

The Act of Killing did not win the Oscar.

Thankfully, Citizenfour gets the recognition it deserves. It also gives a nod to Snowden and what he did, almost hinting that the world, the society, is grateful to him for bringing in public light how every web user is under surveillance.

It also legitimises, rightly, Snowden and his friends. The award was accepted by Citizenfour director Laura Poitras, who was apparently so hated by the US authorities at a time that she was almost always detained at US airports between 2006 and 2012 after she started working documentaries related to Iraq war. Also on the stage was Greenwald, who has been called names several times and who doesn't live in the US anymore because he doesn't feel safe, Snowden's girlfriend Lindsay Mills.

The fact that these people were in the Dolby Theatre and that they got the applause they deserve shows that for once the Academy did the right thing. It thanked Snowden and it reminded the world that web surveillance is an issue that deserves our attention.

That's how Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill, who accompanied Poitras and Greenwald, to Hong Kong also saw it. He said on the website, "Good news for Laura. Good news too for Snowden: he can treat the Oscar as one of his biggest endorsements yet".