At Sunday night’s Academy Awards, Moonlight earned its place in Oscar history. The tender Barry Jenkins-directed drama took home three awards, including Hollywood’s be-all, end-all prize: best picture, bestowed after one of the most jaw-dropping moments in Oscar history. Though Moonlight’s win was a massive upset in a ceremony expected to be dominated by La La Land, it also signaled something else for all the business-minded prognosticators of awards season—A24, the five-year-old distribution company that also financed Moonlight, has truly arrived.

The company’s ascent up Hollywood’s awards ladder began at the 2016 Academy Awards, where Brie Larson picked up the best actress Oscar for Room, Amy was named best documentary, and Ex Machina got the prize for best visual effects—all A24 films. In one night, the company, founded by Daniel Katz, John Hodges, and David Fenkel, saw its upstart, cool-kid reputation translate into serious hardware.

The distributor followed those triumphs by nurturing a series of eclectic, buzzed-about movies in 2016, including the slow, trembling horror of The Witch; the exacting dystopian world of The Lobster; the disarming drifter saga of American Honey; the gut-churning violence of Green Room; and the good-hearted strangeness of Swiss Army Man. And then there was Moonlight, Jenkins’s sophomore feature about a lonely boy, who becomes a troubled teen, who becomes a stoic man. The film was nominated for eight awards Sunday, including best picture. (The Lobster and another A24 film, 20th Century Women, were also up for screenplay prizes, though they did not win.) Moonlight went home with Oscar’s top honor, along with two other statuettes—for best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay. “Even in my dreams this could not be true,” Jenkins exclaimed from the Oscars stage, after finally taking the podium to accept the film’s best picture statuette. “But to hell with dreams! I’m done with it, because this is true. Oh, my goodness.”

“We spent the first part of the night just in shock at the governor’s ball and then made our way to Vanity Fair toasting Barry, Tarell [Alvin McCraney, the co-writer], and the rest of our filmmaker partners,“ A24 said via e-mail Monday. “Our whole staff was here from NY as well and they were all celebrating and going nuts at a viewing party.”

All this is a sign that A24 is becoming one of the leading tastemakers in Hollywood, thanks to its knack for identifying and championing filmmakers with keen visions. In an age defined by franchise dreams and $200 million superhero movies, indie filmmakers (and blockbuster-weary fans, frankly) are increasingly desperate to find cinema’s new hero. Contenders abound: Netflix and Amazon (both of which also won their first Oscars on Sunday night) are currently slugging it out over the rights to the hottest properties at festivals from Park City to Berlin in a global prizefight for Oscar gold. There’s also Annapurna, Megan Ellison’s production company, which broke big in 2012 with The Master and Zero Dark Thirty and co-produced Spring Breakers, which A24 distributed. This is to say nothing of established competitors like Fox Searchlight, which put out best-picture winners like Birdman and 12 Years a Slave, or fellow newbies Broad Green Pictures and Bleecker Street. Still, no other Hollywood upstart has had more recent awards-season success than A24. And as Moonlight marched past La La Land on Sunday, it capped an incredible hot streak for the company. A24, by all traditional industry definitions, won the award that everyone wants—just five years after its founding.