Common sense prevails

The Hurt Locker

I don’t normally pay much attention to awards ceremonies as those nominated often aren’t the ones who deserve to be so, and the winners are usually selected for commercial reasons. Like Forrest Gump winning all those Oscars when The Shawshank Redemption came out the same year.

However, I was really pleased to see that Kathryn Bigelow has just won the Directors Guild of America‘s award for feature film this year for the superb The Hurt Locker.

It was up against some real competition (worthwhile, such as Jason Reitman‘s Up In the Air and commercial, such as Avatar – Inglorious Basterds and Precious made up the numbers) but it was without a doubt the best film on the shortlist.

With the exception of Precious, it’s also the cheapest with a budget of around $11m, and a small gross (as of November 2009) of around $16m. Compare that to Avatar with a budget in excess of $230m (maybe as high as $480m including marketting) and a gross pushing $2b!

It just goes to show that you don’t need a stupid budget, a script ripped from Pocahantas and a bunch of stretched Smurfs to win an award. I seriously hope she goes on to get the related Oscar when those awards come up – or at least someone else as deserving.

[UPDATE: I just spotted that a week earlier, The Hurt Locker also won the equivalent award from the Producers Guild of America. Superb.]

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kathryn Bigelow Tops Directors With `Hurt Locker’ (abcnews.go.com)
• Bigelow Wins DGA’s Best Director Award (screenhead.com)
• Iraq bomb drama scoops US award (news.bbc.co.uk)

The article Common sense prevails by Mosher'sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.