Key figures: Kathryn Bigelow (Best Director), Mark Boal (producer and screenwriter, The Hurt Locker), James Cameron (nominee, Avatar), Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock (lead acting winners), Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique (supporting acting winners), Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin (hosts)
Summary
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony was held on March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles, honoring films released in 2009. The evening was co-hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. Its dominant story was the contest between two films directed by former spouses: Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker and James Cameron’s record-breaking science-fiction epic Avatar.
The Hurt Locker won six awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for Bigelow, and Best Original Screenplay for Mark Boal, along with prizes for film editing, sound editing, and sound mixing. Avatar, which had become the highest-grossing film in history, won three technical awards — Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Visual Effects. In the acting categories, Jeff Bridges won Best Actor for Crazy Heart, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side, Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for Inglourious Basterds, and Mo’Nique won Best Supporting Actress for Precious. The ceremony was also the first in more than six decades to feature ten Best Picture nominees rather than five, a change the Academy had announced the previous year.
Significance
Bigelow’s win made her the first woman to receive the Academy Award for Best Director in the eighty-two-year history of the awards, a milestone widely noted given how few women had even been nominated in the category. That a modestly budgeted, independently financed war film prevailed over the year’s most commercially successful production was read as an affirmation of directorial craft over box-office scale.
The expansion of the Best Picture field to ten nominees, adopted partly in response to criticism that popular films such as The Dark Knight had been overlooked, reshaped Oscar campaigning and remained influential in subsequent years. The 82nd ceremony thus marked both a historic breakthrough for women filmmakers and a structural shift in how the Academy’s top honor was contested.