My favorite thing about the Oscars last night? Glenn Greenwald's face as he stood on the stage—holding his little gold statue like it was a paperweight—and eyeballed the crowd with what looked like equal parts wariness and disdain.

I was, of course, thrilled that Citizenfour won (my review back in October basically just said it was required viewing for informed citizenship these days). I happened to be having dinner with friends who were tuning in and out of the Oscars, and I don't think anyone in my party noticed that moment except me. The sound was off, but there was Glenn, surveying the roomful of rich clowns like journalism's version of a Secret Service agent. Which, these days, he kind of is.

Later in the night, he told Buzzfeed that he and Poitras have returned to the US only in carefully timed ways, surrounded by journalists (or, last night, celebrities and TV cameras) to maximize any public exposure should the government try to detain them—as the British government did with Greenwald's partner David Miranda in London in 2013.

“I genuinely feel like when we are given this [NSA] archive [by Snowden] and given the responsibility to report it, one of the responsibilities was to try and maximize the impact and to disseminate the information as widely as we could,” he told Buzzfeed. “There are a lot of people who will only hear about these things and be exposed to the debate through the Oscars and through film, and so we just kind of see it as our responsibility to do it, as suffocating as it might be.”

Congratulations, gang.