Comment: The Hurt Locker shocks and awes at the Oscars

The Hurt Locker swept all before it at the Academy this year with both Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow

The Hurt Locker shocked and awed the Academy this year, not merely taking Best Picture, but Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow. Yet the Iraq bomb-disposal thriller deservedly won the race with more of a slow drip than a big bang. The small-budget film rose from nowhere through word-of-mouth, the internet and worshipful reviews and Bigelow’s stature slowly grew with it. Avatar, it turned out, was a vast blue 3D firework that fizzled out too early.

Few female directors have even been nominated for an Oscar – only Jane Campion, Lena Wertmuller and Sophia Coppola have made the list in these last 82 years – so Bigelow’s achievement is extraordinary, or perhaps as Barbra Streisand said as she presented the award, “well, the time has come”. Interestingly, Bigelow made no mention of being the queen or “king of the world” as Avatar director James Cameron did when he won his first Oscar. Instead Bigelow revealed “the secret to directing is collaborating” and dedicated the award to soldiers in the field.

In many ways Bigelow’s victory was a shift-change that permeated the rest of the awards, Hollywood coming into line with Obama's America, or at least its hopes. The presentation may have been comic, but the prizes were largely serious and thoughtful. Mo’Nique — who won best supporting actress for her monstrous, mercurial mother in Precious — used her speech to credit Hattie McDaniel, the first African American woman to win an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind — for “enduring all she did so I didn’t have to”. Obama-supporter and Precious producer Oprah Winfrey delivered a eulogy from the pulpit on Gabourey Sidibe, the first-time actress who plays abused teenager Precious.

Although Mo’Nique claimed her award was “about the performance and not the politics” — apparently a reference to her refusal to attend campaigning press junkets for Oscar nominations — most of the top ten films did have a political edge to them. In Avatar and The Hurt Locker, there were two very different films about the fall out from military invasion, while District 9 took on apartheid from an alien point of view. In The Blind Side and Precious black teenagers overcome nightmare lives, and even Up in the Air, is a recession movie.

So by the time it came to best actor and actress, the Academicians consoled themselves with something more down-home: Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock as Mr and Mrs Congeniality. Bridges’ award for Best Actor was more like a lifetime achievement award – this was his fifth nomination, and first win since he popped up in 1971 Last Picture Show. On the stage and in Crazy Heart, the film of a clapped out country star, he became a sort of Mr Congeniality – all warmth, heart and soul. But his natural showmanship was nothing compared to the wrenching performance by Colin Firth in A Single Man.

Soccer moms rejoiced as Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side, not out in Britain yet. She plays a Christian Southern belle who rescues a homeless black student and makes him a star footballer. “Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down?” said Bullock, knowing and modest. Her performance, while feisty, develops little in a film which is critics have panned as formulaic, largely ignoring the black teenager’s point of view.

Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for Inglourious Basterds, praising Quentin Tarantino’s “unorthodox method of navigation”. Actually it was about Waltz’s unorthodox upstaging of the whole enterprise, out-weirding Tarantino with an electric character that stayed there long after the Swastika-carving and popcorn. Waltz’s great line comes after he is asked about his nickname Jew Hunter: “It’s just a name that stuck,” he shrugs.

When Up won Best Animated Film, it confirmed the trend that the best children’s films are now being written (rightly) for the people who pay for the tickets. In this case, director Pete Docter dared to offer kids a disquisition on grief, loss and courage, a white-haired pensioner in brown tweed on a Zimmer frame. Not forgetting the best ever animated dogs, gripped by a strange insanity at the trigger of the word “squirrel!”

Perhaps the only great surprise of the evening was that best film in a foreign language went to Argentina’s The Secret in the Eyes rather than the much-touted frontrunners The White Ribbon and A Prophet. The riveting Argentinian thriller has lawyers in a 25-year-long manhunt, and was a massive box office hit for director Juan José Campanella.

Kate Muir, Times Online 08-03-2010

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