Hollywood, March 09: “The Hurt Locker” blew away box office king “Avatar” to take six Oscars, with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win the best director award.
The movie about a US Army bomb disposal squad in Baghdad also took best picture and best screenplay while “Avatar”, made by Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron, won just three Oscars at Sunday’s awards.
“I’d like to dedicate this to the women and men in the military who risk their lives in a daily basis in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world,” said Bigelow, only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director by Academy voters. “May they come home safe.”
It was a perfectly scripted night at the Kodak Theater for Bigelow, whose low-budget film had been locked in a duel with “Avatar” and Cameron, whose 500-million-dollar science-fiction epic has become the highest-grossing film in history with more than 2.5 billion dollars in earnings. “Avatar” mainly won its Oscars in technical categories.
The face-off had been billed as the “Battle of the Exes” but Bigelow and Cameron smiled and joked throughout the evening as they sat just a few feet apart throughout the show.
—Agencies