"THE HURT LOCKER" SCORES UPSET AT THE OSCAR

It was a historic night at the Academy Awards
The Hurt Locker, the low-budget, low-grossing war film about bomb-disposal experts in Iraq, with only $20 million in worldwide box office, won six Oscars Sunday night, including best picture. Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in the academy’s 82-year history to be named best director. “It’s the moment of a lifetime,” she said, dedicating the award to the soldiers who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. “May they come home safe.”
Her controversial film — which is the subject of a lawsuit and complaints about its authenticity— beat the $2.5-billion-dollar blockbuster Avatar, which won just three awards: for visual effects, cinematography and art direction. The main Oscars turned out to be made of unobtanium for director James Cameron who, in a coincidence that could happen only in Hollywood, is Bigelow’s former husband.
Mark Boal’s script for The Hurt Locker was named best original screenplay — Boal dedicated the award to the American troops in Iraq — and it also won the awards for film editing, sound editing and sound mixing.
Sandra Bullock won the Oscar as best actress for her performance as the tough-minded Southern socialite who helps a homeless black teenager in The Blind Side. The night before, Bullock won the Razzie award for worst performance of the year in All About Steve, making her the first performer in history to win a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year. Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” she asked, paying tribute to the other nominees — who included Meryl Streep, celebrating her 16th nomination (and 14th defeat) — and her mother for not letting her ride in cars with boys until she was 18, “because she was right: I would have done what she said I was going to do.” Bullock took time out of her thank-yous to tell George Clooney she still hasn’t forgiven him for throwing her into a pool several years ago.
Jeff Bridges celebrated his fifth nomination with his first Oscar for his performance as the alcoholic, womanizing country singer Bad Blake in the country-music drama Crazy Heart. “Thank you, mom and dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession,” Bridges said, looking skyward. He said his father, the late actor Lloyd Bridges, taught him the basics of acting for a role in his 1950s TV series, Sea Hunt.
Mo’Nique, best known as a comedienne and talk-show host, was named best supporting actress. She won for her harrowing portrayal of the abusive and pathetic mother in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, a performance that breathed life into one of the most monstrous parents ever portrayed on screen. The actress — born Monique Imes — thanked the academy for showing “it can be about the performance and not the politics.” Precious also won an Oscar for Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay.

Christoph Waltz, the multilingual Austrian actor whose portrayal of a playfully sadistic Nazi energized the Second World War revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, won the best supporting-actor award. Waltz, who was front-runner for the award since the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, praised the “unorthodox methods of navigation” of director Quentin Tarantino, for bringing the good ship Inglourious Basterds safely into port “with flying colours.”
As expected, a different kind of fantasy — Up, the story of an old man’s long-awaited adventure in a house that is carried into the sky by balloons — won the Oscar for best animated movie. “Never did I realize that making a flip book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this,” said co-director Pete Docter. The movie also won the Oscar for best original score.
However, there was a surprise in the Oscar for best foreign film, which went to the Argentinian crime drama El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), rather than the favoured A Prophet from France or The White Ribbon from Germany. As expected, The Cove, the heart-rending story of how dolphins are slaughtered in Japan, was named best documentary feature, and The Weary Kind, the melancholy tune from Crazy Heart, was named best song.
Following an ill-conceived musical number by Neil Patrick Harris — a comic song that evoked bad memories of Rob Lowe and Snow White — co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin conducted a surreal standup routine (“And over here is the Inglourious Basterds section. And over here are the people who made the movie”) comprised of inside jokes and genial nonsense, which could also describe much of the show itself.
Logorama, a spoof of corporate logos, won the award for best animated short, Music by Prudence, the story of a disabled singer from Zimbabwe was best documentary short, and The New Tenants — a comic drama about a nightmarish moving day and co-starring Canadian actress Liane Balaban — was named best live-action short. The Young Victoria won the award for best costume design. In keeping with the night’s sci-fi theme, Star Trek won the award for best makeup. It was presented by Ben Stiller, who, unaccountably, dressed as a Na’vi from Avatar, complete with blue face and tail.

The Hurt Locker-Avatar faceoff was complicated by controversy. First, one of Hurt Locker’s producers, Nicholas Chartier, was denied admission to the ceremony for breaking one of the academy rules against denigrating an opponent: He sent out e-mails to a group of voters asking them to vote for his movie rather than Avatar. Then, just before the voting deadline, an Iraq war veteran named Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver filed a lawsuit claiming the movie was based on him and he had not been compensated. There also have been several news stories quoting bomb-disposal experts as saying The Hurt Locker is not authentic.
This year, the academy expanded the nomination list to 10 from five — for the first time since 1943 — partly to broaden the appeal of the Oscars. In the past few years, viewership has fallen: It hit a peak of 55 million when Titanic won the award in 1998, and fell to 32 million who watched No Country for Old Men win in 2008.
The long list of nominees has resulted in a complex voting system, called preferential voting — the kind used in Australian elections — in which the academy’s 5,800 voters mark their ballots in order from one to 10. If no movie gets more than half of the vote, the picture with the lowest vote total is knocked off the list and its second choices are then distributed among the rest. The result is that the winner could be a picture that doesn’t have many first-place votes, but does well as a second or third pick. (Source: The Victoria Times Colonist)