Bafta-winning director Kathryn Bigelow has a good shot at making history and smashing through Hollywood’s celluloid ceiling. The bookies’ favourite to grab the best director Oscar for “The Hurt Locker” on Sunday, she is poised to be the first woman to win the category in the Academy Awards’ 82 years. Bigelow is, mind-bogglingly, just the fourth woman ever nominated, following Lina Wertmüller (“Seven Beauties”, 1976), Jane Campion (“The Piano”, 1993) and Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”, 2003).
The lack of nominations may come down to maths; there simply aren’t that many female Hollywood film directors. In the early days of the movies, up until the 1960s, you could count women directors on one hand, from pioneer Dorothy Arzner to actress/director Ida Lupino. The 1970s and 80s saw a trickle of women breaking through, such as Amy Heckerling and Elaine May, but even today it is still only a trickle. Birds Eye View, the London charity that supports women’s filmmaking through festivals and workshops, reckons that just 6% of film directors worldwide are women (and, perhaps not incidentally, just 12% of screenwriters).
Yet there will be much to celebrate if Bigelow does win. Her importance as a filmmaker is because she defies gender and genre. Many women directors in Hollywood are ghettoised into helming biopics or rom-coms, but Bigelow has worked mostly on “dick flicks”: muscular action movies with explosions aplenty, which she brings a deep intelligence to—and continually subverts expectations.
Upending the male gaze
Her breakthrough, 1987’s cult classic hillbilly vampire flick “Near Dark”, seems like B-movie horror. Yet at its heart is a complex family drama, with the central love story between drifter Caleb and vampire Mae light year’s more nuanced and romantic than that of undead couple of the moment, Twilight’s Bella and Edward. Similarly, on the surface her most famous film, “Point Break,” is a pulse-pounding heist movie. But it’s really a homoerotic love story between Keanu Reeves’ “young, dumb and full of come” undercover FBI man and Patrick Swayze’s surfer dude/bank robber. The way Bigelow’s camera lingers on Reeves’ and Swayze’s buff bodies upends about 100 years of cinema’s predominantly male gaze. “The Hurt Locker” itself at its most basic reading is a violent testosterone-charged actioner, but it’s more a mediation on the moral and psychological complications of modern warfare.
Doing it better
So would a Bigelow win be a watershed? Convention-breaking Oscar history is not encouraging. In 1939, Hattie MacDonald was the first African-American to grab an Academy Award for “Gone With the Wind”, but the next wasn’t until 1963 when Sidney Poitier took home best actor. For Bigelow to triumph, maybe it has to be this sort of movie, an action film that appeals to men (who make up the bulk of the Academy’s voters). Still, for women yearning to get behind the camera, it can only help, underlining to supposedly liberal studio bosses—who seem entrenched in a “Mad Men”-esque “guys in the boardroom drinking whisky, girls in the typing pool looking pretty” mode—that a woman can make “their” type of movie…and do it better.