kathryn bigelow

The Hurt Locker deserves its Oscars landslide

The Academy made history with the long overdue recognition of a female film-maker, but in other respects this year's ceremony was a night of anticlimaxes
As is so often, this year's list of Oscar winners is exasperatingly mixed and – now that the pre-Oscar period is so hugely crammed with rival awards bonanzas, with the frontrunners exhaustively established – these results seem anticlimactic. It's as if the awards season has scooped itselfBut at least this time there is a resounding and satisfying endorsement for a really excellent film: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a brutally powerful picture about the endgame in Iraq, which made its relatively modest debut at the Venice film festival in 2008 but kept on growing. This, notably, was a movie whose prestige was kept alive by critics. In a digital age when film reviewers are supposed to be losing their lustre, I am almost tempted – almost – to say that this year's Oscars was a bit of a pat on the back for scribblers, and to lead a virtual delegation of pundits up on stage to accept the Still Unexpectedly Important Taste-Maker award.

Except that we're, erm, not. The critical consensus had also backed Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet as modern masterpieces which deserved to be nominated for best film, best director, etc, and not simply to be ghettoised in the foreign language film section. As it is, the big raspberry of the evening came when these great films lost out anyway. Like my colleague Xan Brooks, I must now confess that I have not yet seen Juan José Campanella's The Secret of Their Eyes – it is much liked and admired, but I can't help feeling that this is a real banana-skin moment. It puts me in mind of Ronald Bergan's online discussion of how, in the history of world cinema, the Oscar for best foreign language film is traditionally given to the wrong film.

When Mo'Nique came up to accept her thoroughly deserved best supporting actress Oscar for Precious, she referred to the history of African-Americans at the Academy Awards and alluded to Hattie McDaniel's triumph way back in 1939. As the winner of the best director award, Bigelow had no such history to draw upon: she is making history. Incredibly, she is the first woman to win a best director award, and it is unfortunately a measure of the casual sexism in the movie business and the awards industry that this omission has been all but unnoticed in the past, and not particularly noticed now. But this was a brilliant film which deserves its landslide.