The Hurt Locker’ Wins at Oscars

March 8, 2010
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — “The Hurt Locker,” a little-seen war film with big backing from the critics, pushed past “Avatar” and other crowd-pleasers to win the best picture Oscar at a Sunday night ceremony here, while its director, Kathryn Bigelow, became the first woman to win the directing award.

“Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” had come into the night as favorites, but the smaller film took the prize from the bigger in the end.

“There’s no other way to describe it, it’s the moment of a lifetime,” said Ms. Bigelow in accepting her award. It was presented by Barbra Streisand, who announced it with the words, “Well, the time has come.”

Mark Boal, a producer of “The Hurt Locker,” said of his modest expectations when the movie was shot back in 2007, “Hopefully, we would find a distributor and somebody might even like the movie.”

There was no mention of a last-minute embarrassment in which a fellow producer of the film, Nicolas Chartier, had been banned from the show for violating Oscar rules by urging academy members by e-mail messages to vote against a film assumed to be “Avatar,” which had the advantage of a vast budget and enormous popularity.

In a sense, the awards season had shaped up into a showdown between James Cameron, who directed “Avatar,” and Ms. Bigelow, who was previously married to Mr. Cameron.

Among other winners, Christoph Waltz took best supporting actor at the start of a sluggishly paced ceremony for his bilingual performance as a Jew-hunting Nazi officer in “Inglourious Basterds.” And also, as expected, Mo’Nique won for best supporting actress for her portrait of a terrifying mother in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.” With no excess of modesty, Mo’Nique thanked the academy’s members for showing that “it can be about the performance, not the politics.” The remark was a reference not just to her considerable talent, but to the fact that she had refused to spend time playing the usual Oscar campaign game. Backstage, she blamed the media for trying to stir up a controversy.

Jeff Bridges, a multiple nominee and now first-time winner, took best actor for his gritty portrayal of a broken-down country singer in “Crazy Heart.” A darling of the Hollywood crowd, Mr. Bridges had been seen as the designated winner almost from the moment Fox Searchlight made a last-minute decision to drop the low-budget movie into the Oscar race. “Thank you, Mom and Dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession,” said the gray-bearded Mr. Bridges, who brought the crowd to its feet in a prolonged ovation as he whooped, hollered and showed obvious joy in the moment.

“Crazy Heart,” one of the evening’s smaller contenders, also took an Oscar for its theme song, “The Weary Kind,” by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett.

Sandra Bullock, who had been pointed toward an Oscar since winning a bellwether Screen Actors Guild award, won best actress for her performance as a tough and loving contemporary Southern mother in “The Blind Side.” Like Mr. Bridges, she was clearly a favorite of those in the auditorium, though she had never been nominated before and had been best known for romantic comedies like “The Proposal” and the occasional action film, like “Speed.”

“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” Ms. Bullock asked her cheering peers.

“Up in the Air” was shut out, although the movie, about a corporate operative who specializes in firing people, had propped up the long awards season with appearances at various prize ceremonies on both coasts and in England by George Clooney, its star, and Jason Reitman, the writer-director.

The show clocked in at a relatively long three hours and 32 minutes, but at times it felt longer than it actually was. That was mostly because the first half was loaded with clip samples and retrospectives, while the latter part moved along with the speed that one of its producers, Bill Mechanic, had promised in advance.

Before the bigger awards were announced, there was a trip back to “The Dark Knight,” as Morgan Freeman explained how sound editors handled a movie from an earlier year, and a lengthy string of excerpts from horror movies, in an effort to reach fans who do not find movies like the “Twilight” series on the show.

The pace had already slowed with the screening of highlights — and the introduction of two recipients, Roger Corman and Lauren Bacall — from an honorary-awards ceremony that had been moved off-camera to a November date, precisely to keep the show from slowing.

This came only a few minutes after a narrator took time to read chunks of script over clips from the best adapted screenplay nominees. But Geoffrey Fletcher, a first-time nominee who won for “Precious,” put some heart in the proceedings as he gasped and seemed to weep in accepting. “I thank everyone,” Mr. Fletcher said simply.

Going into the evening, Mr. Cameron’s 3-D blockbuster, “Avatar,” was expected to dominate the evening along with the smaller, intense film “The Hurt Locker.”

But it was not until nearly halfway through that “Avatar” won its first award, for art direction. It was presented by Sigourney Weaver, one of the film’s stars, who sounded relieved as she opened the envelope and spoke the film’s title. Awards for cinematography and visual effects followed. But “The Hurt Locker” had already won for its original screenplay, sound editing and sound mixing, and later added one for film editing, ending any thought that Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes types might have rallied behind “Avatar.”

For most of the night the ceremony put in sharp relief a split between the 5,777 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who in many categories continued a recent tradition of honoring small, independent-style movies, and their own broadcast, which played heavily into the big movies.

Ms. Bullock, from a crowd-pleaser, “The Blind Side,” took the stage as a presenter and was the subject of congenial jokes about her career, which has been heavier on commerce than art, with movies like “The Proposal” and “Miss Congeniality.”

“Avatar,” meanwhile, was a constant presence. Ms. Weaver, Zoë Saldana and Sam Worthington, the film’s stars, were all presenters. From an Oscar stage that was bathed in blue for most of the night, presenters and hosts aimed quips at Mr. Cameron, who had a Na’vi blue kerchief (a reference to characters in “Avatar”) in the pocket of his tuxedo and generally traded on the film’s vast popularity in a clear bid to hold viewers, even as the prizes were sprinkled among other films, many of which had made only a small mark at the box office.

The best documentary feature award, presented by Matt Damon, went to “The Cove,” a film that exposed the slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese village. The best foreign language feature, presented by Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino, went to “The Secret in Their Eyes” (“El Secreto de Sus Ojos”) from Argentina.

Mr. Boal’s original screenplay for “The Hurt Locker” made an expected mark for that film. In accepting the prize Mr. Boal talked of his experience as a war correspondent, and dedicated the Oscar to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In more of a surprise, Geoffrey Fletcher won the award for best adapted screenplay for “Precious.”

The Walt Disney Company’s “Up,” about a septuagenarian’s wild balloon ride, won for best animated feature. The prize for “Up” was very much according to the script: it was the fifth computer-animated blockbuster from Disney’s Pixar unit to win the animation Oscar since the category was created for the pictures released in 2001.

In keeping with the straight-ahead nature of the proceedings, clips from the 10 best-picture nominees were shown throughout the show, while another set of clips honored the movies of John Hughes, the comic filmmaker of movies like “Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” who died last year without ever having been nominated for an Oscar during his prolific career.

The ceremony seemed to drag a bit as a result, and, less than an hour in, was already drawing complaints about pacing from a bevy of second-guessers who expressed their opinions online.

As the show opened at the Kodak Theater, the Oscar co-hosts, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, dropped onto the stage from above, holding hands. The two traded quips in a monologue that tweaked a whole string of nominees.

“Over here is the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ section,” Mr. Martin said.

“And over here are the people who made the movie,” joined Mr. Baldwin, Martin-and-Lewis style. The two donned 3-D glasses to peer at Mr. Cameron, director of “Avatar.”

It was a comfortable, by-the-numbers beginning for a show that promised to pit Hollywood’s Davids against some movie Goliaths before it ended.

With the sun finally peeking through the clouds after an off-and-on drizzle on Sunday afternoon, celebrities began to swarm the red carpet outside the theater, where the Academy Awards would be presented. Many first-time nominees still seemed surprised that they had actually made it to the end of what had been a longer-than-usual awards season.

Mr. Clooney, nominated for best actor for “Up in the Air,” said he was not sure whether the decision to expand this year’s field of best-picture nominees from 5 to 10 would benefit filmmaking, but he thought it would be good for the Oscar telecast. “You can get more people on it,” he said. “I think it’s sort of like making the basket bigger in the basketball court so more points get scored.”

In the gown parade before the ceremony began, Suzy Amis, who is married to Mr. Cameron, made something more than a fashion statement by wearing the movie’s signature Na’vi blue, as did several actresses and other women on hand. But Ms. Weaver apparently did not get the memo: she showed up in bright red.

During the ceremony, Ben Stiller appeared in Na’vi blueface and tail to present the make-up award, which went to “Star Trek.” (“Avatar” was not nominated in the category.) He sputtered nonsense lines in what mimicked an alien language that had been created for “Avatar,” and said, “That means, ‘This seemed like a better idea at the time.’ ”

Adam Shankman, a producer of the telecast and a judge on the Fox reality show “So You Think You Can Dance,” choreographed an aggressive dance number to open the show that was marked by a Las Vegas sensibility. Participating in the ceremony were 36 “opening dancers” and 33 “score suite” dancers.

Even before the show began, the year’s awards had made some bits of Oscar history. Lee Daniels, with “Precious,” became the first black director to have a best-picture nominee, while Ms. Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) was only the fourth woman — along with Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Lina Wertmüller — to have been nominated for best director.

The Oscar season was stretched by two weeks to make room for the Winter Olympics, but managed to culminate with renewed frivolity. The expanded best-picture field meant more cocktail parties, and there was little holding back the flow of Champagne, unlike the last two years when a threatened actors’ strike and then the global recession made the bacchanal take on a more somber tone (at least publicly).

On Friday “Precious” dominated Film Independent’s Spirit Awards at a tent show in downtown Los Angeles, taking prizes for best picture and director, among others. On Saturday Harvey Weinstein presided over a party in West Hollywood for nominees from “Inglourious Basterds,” “Nine” and “A Single Man,” all distributed by his Weinstein Company.

Outside the theater before the ceremony, the acres of red carpet came alive with a stronger turnout of stars and executives than in years past, when many had been staying home in silent protest of the Academy’s turn away from splashy, big-budget pictures in favor of the arty and small.


Melena Ryzik contributed reporting from Los Angeles.