So the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences REALLY hates James Cameron. Not that The Hurt Locker didn’t deserve to clean up — it did in a big bad way — but one can’t help but look at the winners of categories like Sound Mixing or even Original Screenplay (which Cameron wasn’t nominated for, of course, but a vote for The Hurt Locker was a vote AGAINST Avatar) and not imagine the director’s peers flipping him off as they mail in their ballots. “Who’s Avatarded now?” laughs one Academy member to himself. “King of the world?” asks another. “You’re barely a prince!” And so on with the funny and original puns. For a lot of Hollywood, James Cameron is as easy to hate as a scum-sucking Republican!
But petulant dismissal of a STAGGERING CINEMATIC ACHIEVEMENT aside, the Academy did manage to do one thing right last night: naming Kathryn Bigelow Best Director, the first woman to win the trophy in the ceremony’s 82 years. You’re King Queen of the World, Kathryn! And LONG OVERDUE!
Photo from The New York Times
Not even Babs presenting the award (or Oprah’s wholly inappropriate appearance ten minutes earlier, but that’s an entirely different post…) could ruin what was an undeniably special and important moment in Oscar history. It meant too much; the victory was practically cosmic. And we’ve finally arrived, one hopes, at the beginning of a label-less era of film direction — one where “female” is no longer synonymous with “Nancy Meyers” (and “terrible”), but simply means that the person running the show…happens to have lady-parts. Equality, baby.
Tags: Avatar, James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Oscars 2010, The Hurt Locker, Women
Lifting Fog 
April 6, 2010 at 9:33 am |
Here, here! I’m not sure the glass ceiling is completely shattered into a million pieces, but there’s a big ole hole in it now that Kathryn, Sofia Coppola, and Kimberly Peirce can climb through. (They can let Nora Ephron up for awhile, too, if she promises to make another movie as good as Sleepless in Seattle.)
And I don’t even watch Jersey Shore or George Lopez, but that vid was genius!
April 6, 2010 at 10:56 am |
Who is Kimberly Pierce? I wouldn’t mind so much if Nora Ephron won an Oscar for writing, but her directing has always just been sort of perfunctory. Here’s hoping Bigelow inspires a new generation of independently-minded female directors!
April 6, 2010 at 12:35 pm |
Kimberly did Boys Don’t Cry and Stop-Loss (which, although it got written off as teenybopper MTV junk, was actually a great movie).
April 18, 2010 at 7:34 pm |
Henning, I’m waitin’ on your next post! Also, AAA brought Wong Fu Productions to Columbia today! Do you know them? http://www.youtube.com/user/wongfuproductions?blend=1&ob=4