Los Angeles, March 08: While James Cameron’s sci-fi epic ‘Avatar’ bagged the Oscar for best art direction at the 82nd Academy Awards, the film’s supposed rival ‘The Hurt Locker’ also won several awards at the ceremony on Sunday.
Paul NJ Ottosson won the Oscar for best sound editing for the war drama ‘The Hurt Locker’, while Ray Beckett and Ottosson bagged the golden statuette for sound mixing for the same movie at the 82nd Academy Awards.
The Iraq War drama ‘The Hurt Locker’ won its first category of the night, original screenplay for Mark Boal, who spun a story about the perils and pressures of a US bomb unit in Iraq.
With nine nominations, ‘The Hurt Locker’ tied for the Oscar lead with the sci-fi epic ‘Avatar.’ The competition between the front-runners does not heat up until later in the night, the two films nominated in categories that mostly come in the second half of the Oscar show.
On the other hand, Christoph Waltz won the supporting-actor Academy Award for his role as a convivial fiend of a Nazi in ‘Inglourious Basterds.’
The first award of Oscar night went to Austrian-born Waltz, a veteran stage and TV actor in Europe who had been virtually unknown in Hollywood before Quentin Tarantino cast him as the prattling Hans Landa in his World War II saga.
Disney/Pixar’s balloon adventure blockbuster ‘Up’ won the best animated movie Oscar, as the studio continued its dominance of cartoons at the Academy Awards. “Never did I dream that making a flip-book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this,” said ‘Up’ director Pete Docter.
Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin opened the show with playful ribbing of nominees, including Meryl Streep, Sandra Bullock, Woody Harrelson, Mo’Nique, Cameron and Bigelow.
-Agencies