WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s oldest film industry awards has just announced its winners for 2015. The 58th CINE Golden…

WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s oldest film industry awards has just announced its winners for 2015.

The 58th CINE Golden Eagle Awards for Professional Media honor originality and storytelling in media across genres and distribution platforms.

“A Most Violent Year,” starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, won the prize for best live-action feature, beating out finalists “Big Eyes,” “The Imitation Game” and “St. Vincent.”

On the TV side, winners include NBC’s “Hannibal” among fiction content and CNN’s “Morgan Spurlock: Inside Man” among non-fiction content.

Click here to see the full list of this year’s winners.

The D.C.-based organization has given many famous filmmakers an early break. In 1963, Mel Brooks won the award for his short film “The Critic.” In 1969, Steven Spielberg won for his short film “Amblin.'” In 1972, a 15-year-old Ron Howard won for his short “Deed of Daring Do.” And in 1981, Ken Burns won for his very first documentary, “Brooklyn Bridge.”

Other legends have been honored well into their careers, from Barbara Kopple (1992) to Spike Lee (1999) to Martin Scorsese (2006), adding to their already crowded mantles.

CINE was created in 1957 as a private-public partnership with the USIA branch of the State Department as a way to accredit U.S. documentary and industrial films to send to large foreign festivals (Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam). The CINE Golden Eagle Award was created as the method to choose films for submission to the overseas festivals.

Over the years, the CINE Golden Eagle Awards expanded to include student, independent, narrativeand television productions. By the mid-1990s, CINE’s partnership with the State Department ceased, and the Golden Eagle Awards were presented as a symbol of peer-reviewed media excellence rather than as a conduit to foreign film festivals.

Now, under the new leadership of Jon Gann, who successfully turned DC Shorts into the “World’s Coolest Short Film Festival,” CINE is dividing its awards into three different categories.

The Professional Media winners were just announced, while the Independent and Student Media winners will be announced this summer. The organization will then celebrate the winners with three networking parties in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles in October.

Click here to read more about the Golden Eagle Award recipients and finalists.

DISCLAIMER: The author is a former CINE Golden Eagle recipient in 2011.