Oscar outcome

I was 5 of 6 for the top awards at last night's Oscars. Sandra Bullock's shocking Best Actress win threw my predictions all out of whack. I also missed both screenplay picks, both documentaries, both short subjects, best foreign film, cinematography, sound editing and film editing. Ouch.

Otherwise, the night's big news was the groundbreaking win by Kathryn Bigelow for Best Picture and Best Director for the excellent but little-seen The Hurt Locker. Many people now know Bigelow as the first woman to win a directing Oscar and the ex-wife of James Cameron.

But you may not know that the 58-year-old Bigelow has a long list of credits prior to this year's award-winner.

Let's start with Near Dark, a 1987 roadhouse-meets-vampire film that has become a cult classic. Adrian Pasdar, Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton star.

Another Bigelow action film is Point Break, the 1991 feature starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Best known for some amazing surfing and sky-diving sequences, the movie also features one of the best hand-held, first-person chases I've ever seen.

A couple of Bigelow films I have yet to watch include Strange Days, a 1995 science fiction feature written by James Cameron and starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Roger Ebert gives the movie four stars, and I am now trying to find the time to watch my DVD from Netflix.

And K-19:The Widowmaker (2002) is Bigelow's latest feature before tackling The Hurt Locker. The submarine drama stars Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and is next in my Netflix cue.

What's next for Bigelow? This story says she is to direct the pilot for a new HBO series billed as a light family drama. Then she returns to the grittier side of life with a feature about a lawless region in South America known as the Triple Frontier.

Is The Hurt Locker inauthentic?

Tomorrow is the last day for Academy members to vote on this year's Oscars, and it's interesting to note that both The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times published stories this final weekend attacking the movie as inaccurately portraying the experience of combat veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Until now, The Hurt Locker has been notable for the near-absence of any political controversy, particularly strange for a movie about a war that is still going on. The film is not explicitly anti-war, nor does it take an overt position on George Bush's move into Iraq.

Is it a coincidence that two papers on opposite coasts mount such similar stories just days before votes are due in an Oscar race in which The Hurt Locker has emerged as a favorite?

What do you think? Is the movie pro- or anti-war, pro- or anti-military?

Oscar voting algebra

Very interesting analysis piece in the New Yorker about the Oscar nominations.

In addition to expanding the best picture nominees from five to ten this year, there's been a big change in the way votes are cast for the top award. In the past, members voted for their favorite picture, and the nominee with the most votes won. Not so starting this year. Who knew you would need a degree in higher mathematics to understand the rules:

Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

The story also says the two frontrunners are Avatar and Hurt Locker, and it makes the case for why the Hurt Locker might actually win. Bottom line: most everyone likes it and a vote for this little war drama is a vote for the first woman (Kathryn Bigelow) to direct a best picture winner.