If I’m not mistaken the story was: despite the movie being much less impressive technically, its narrative and emotional force pushed it ahead of much more polished movies.
Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch.
It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.
I think that's a little unfair to Blender. Clearly "was able to produce an Oscar-winning animation" is a pretty high bar, even if it isn't as high as "actually won an Oscar for animation technology" (or whatever it is).
If you watch the release video embedded in the post you can hear both part of the acceptance speech from the makers of Flow where they explicitly thank Blender, and also can also see a special oscar scene, which I assume the creators of Flow made specifically for this version announcement.
In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.
Well, people need an alternative to CG big tech. This fits the narrative really well, and was just the tipping point to a growing disdain towards Autodesk.
Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch.
It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.