Bird's Eye View

Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director

Kathryn Bigelow wins the Oscar for Best Director

She did it! Kathryn Bigelow has made film history by becoming the first ever woman in all 82 years of the Oscars to win the Best Director Academy Award for her low-budget war drama The Hurt Locker. Filmmaking women across the world, including we BEV-vers, stood up and applauded her in front of our TVs at 5am this morning! Bigelow’s fellow nominees were her ex-husband James Cameron for Avatar, Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds, Jason Reitman for Up In The Air and Lee Daniels for Precious. Daniels would have been the first black director to have won this Oscar if his name had been in the envelope opened by Barbra Streisand (herself the first woman to win Best Director Golden Globe for Yentl in 1984), and we hope this happens soon, but this year is all Bigelow’s, and all yours!

In her gracious acceptance speech dedicated to the men and women fighting in Iraq, Bigelow claimed this as ‘the moment of a lifetime’. The Hurt Locker also won Best Picture Oscar, despite having a mostly unknown cast and taking as its brutal and crucial subject the men deployed to diffuse bombs in war-stricken Iraq. There’s no fantasy romance at the prow of a sinking ship for this intelligent and visionary filmmaker; Bigelow’s film has been reviewed as the best war film ever made, and was funded partly by Bigelow herself.

We salute Bigelow for being a true role model for women filmmakers, pioneering high-brow and uncompromising cinema, and defying any gender-stereotypes that still exist in the Board Rooms and studio sets of Hollywood and around the world. We look forward to seeing The Hurt Locker’s box office figures rise again during its post-Oscars screenings, which should be across the country very soon. Go and see it again, and be inspired by Bigelow’s momentous success!

What news to get on International Women’s Day and midway through our festival celebrating women filmmakers!