Good luck travels decades fr Cape Town S. Africa back to US folk musician, Rodriguez, to Oscar for "Searching for Sugar Man"...

Best documentary feature winners Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn accept their award onstage for "Searching for Sugarman," about the reclusive Detroit musician Rodriguez, at the 85th annual Academy Awards.

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'Searching for Sugar Man' Wins Oscar, and More Praise for Rodriguez
"Searching for Sugar Man," honored with more than 30 awards in the last year, won the big one when it was named best documentary at the 85th annual Academy Awards. Director Malik Bendjelloul's film about the forgotten musician Rodriguez capped its journey that began at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival where Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film, leading to a theatrical release in July.

(below content may contain spoilers for the film)

Sixto Díaz Rodríguez (born July 10, 1942) is a folk musician, wildly popular, extremely successful and influential in South Africa, mistakenly rumored to have committed suicide. In his home country - America, no one knows about him, about his music - two little-sold albums in the early 1970s.

In the late 1990s, two determined Cape Town fans, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom tried to find out if the rumored death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true, and, if not, to discover what had become of him.

In 1997, Stephen "Sugar" Segerman set up a website, called 'The Great Rodriguez Hunt', with the intention of finding any information about the mysterious US musician of 'Cold Fact' fame. In the same year Brian Currin established 'Climb Up On My Music', a tribute site to the life and works of Rodriguez. In 1998, when Rodriguez was discovered, alive and well and living in Detroit, the search was over and those two websites were combined into this one central online repository for all information about Rodriguez.

Swedish Malik Bendjelloul (born 14 September 1977) set his mind on a single-handed documentary film project to detail 2-Cape-Town men's journey: "Searching for Sugar Man" (Sugarman is the title of one of Rodríguez's songs). "Initially using 8 mm film to record some scarce, stylized shots for the movie, director Bendjelloul ran out of money for more film to record the final few shots. He resorted to filming the remaining stylized shots on his smartphone using an iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera to complete the film." The Oscar win caps the incredible 13-month journey of the film, about which traces the strange, almost unbelievable tale of Detroit folk musician Rodriguez from obscurity to international success, largely without his knowing, The Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man tells the almost unbelievable story of a Mexican-American songwriter whose two early Seventies albums bombed in America, but who wound up finding a huge audience in Apartheid-era South Africa. Sixto Rodriguez had no idea he was a legend there until a group of fans found him on the Internet and brought him to the country for a series of triumphant concerts. But while Searching for Sugar Man (soundtrack and DVD now available) is a fantastic film, it only grazes the surface of Rodriguez’s life story. Here are 10 things you may not know about Rodriguez: Not only did he skip the Oscar ceremony - he was asleep when he won. Searching for Sugar Man director Malik Bendjelloul begged Rodriguez to attend the Oscars, but he refused, feeling it would take the attention away from the filmmakers. "We also just came back from South Africa and I was tired," Rodriguez says. "I was asleep when it won, but my daughter Sandra called to tell me. I don’t have TV service anyway."

The film, which traces the strange, almost unbelievable tale of Detroit folk musician Rodriguez from obscurity to international success, largely without his knowing, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature at the 85th Academy Awards, 2013. The crowd-pleasing film was heavily favored to win going into the ceremony. Rodriguez, 70, was not at the ceremony, "because he didn't want to take any of the credit himself," producer Simon Chinn explained from the Oscar stage while accepting the award. "And that just about says everything about that man and his story that you want to know."

Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 soundtrack album from the documentary containing a compilation of songs by Rodriguez from his two studio albums. As a result of the popularity of the documentary, the album climbed surprisingly high for a soundtrack album in many national album charts. In Sweden, it reached #3 in early 2013 when the Academy Award nomination was announced, and had been in the charts for 26 weeks by the time it received the award in February 2013; in Denmark it reached #18; and in New Zealand it reached #24.

Tracklist -

"Sugar Man" (3:50)
"Crucify Your Mind" (2:32)
"Cause" (5:29)
"I Wonder" (2:34)
"Like Janis" (2:37)
"This Is Not a Song, It's an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues" (2:07)
"Can't Get Away" (3:56)
"I Think of You" (3:26)
"Inner City Blues" (3:27)
"Sandrevan Lullaby – Lifestyles" (6:39)
"Street Boy" (3:47)
"A Most Disgusting Song" (4:48)
"I'll Slip Away" (2:51)
"Jane S. Piddy" (3:00)

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Photos courtesy of Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images and Sony Pictures