Female director makes history at the Oscars

LOS ANGELES, Monday

Hollywood finally entrusted a female director with an Oscar on Sunday. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards to take the prize as her gritty Iraq War movie The Hurt Locker outshone Avatar after a nail-biting campaign season.

The Hurt Locker also took home the top prize, best picture, and four awards in other categories. Avatar, the 3D (3-dimension) smash directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron, ended up with three awards, all in technical categories. The acting races finished as expected and all four honorees took home the first statuettes of their careers.

Country singer

Jeff Bridges won for his lead role as a drunken country singer who gets a shot at redemption in Crazy Heart. Sandra Bullock got the gold for playing a suburban mom who guides a homeless black teen to football stardom in The Blind Side.

In the supporting field, the prizes went to Austrian actor Christoph Waltz for the Nazi revenge fantasy Inglorious Bastards, and stand-up comic Mo’Nique for the dark urban drama Precious, based on the novel Push’by Sapphire.

The biggest shocks were in the adapted screenplay and foreign-language film categories. Geoffrey Fletcher became the first African-American to win the writing prize, for his work on Precious. The prize had been expected to go to Up in the Air, a six-time nominee that was snubbed.

The Argentine crime drama The Secret in their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) beat Germany’s The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) and France’s A Prophet (Un prophete) to claim the country’s second prize in the field.

In voting for The Hurt Locker, Hollywood insiders clearly showed a preference for a relatively obscure movie that suffered a similar commercial fate as other films revolving around the Iraq War. With North American ticket sales of about $15 million — about half of what Avatar earned in its first day — The Hurt Locker is one of the least-commercial best-picture Oscar winners ever.

The film, based on a story by journalist Mark Boal, follows an American bomb-disposal squad in Iraq. Boal won an Oscar for his original screenplay, and was also a producer, along with Bigelow, Greg Shapiro, and French financier Nicolas Chartier. The best-picture win was a bittersweet moment for Chartier, who was banned from the ceremony last week after breaking Oscar campaign rules by sending out an e-mail to voters.

Bigelow, 58, shot the film in the Jordanian desert in the middle of summer almost three years ago on a shoestring budget of $15 million. It marked her first movie since the costly 2002 submarine flop K19: The Widowmaker. Only three other women had ever been nominated for the directing Oscar, most recently Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2004.