Would anyone have imagined a better notice of 100 anniversary of International Women’s Day this year? A first woman ever in the history of Hollywood received the Oscar for Best Director / Best Movie – Kathryn Bigelow – and won the statuette the very same day, 8th March 2010.
However, there is no too many reasons to celebrate: a study recently found out that only nine percent of all Hollywood directors are women – and, what’s more, over a period of ten years, this percentage has hardly changed. These few women tend to make films about women’s issues. Examples are: Nancy Meyers’ film called “What Women Want” and “The Holiday,” Penny Marshall’s “Traveling with Boys” and “Bewitched,” Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” or “Lost in Translation”.

But Kathryn Bigelow is the exception to this rule. The director, who once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in temperature below zero, stable her movies in men’s romps genres – “Blue Steel” was a cop thriller, “Point Break” is a crime-drama, “Strange Days” – Science Fiction, “K 19: Showdown in the depths” – a submarine drama. Almost all Bigelow’s movies are trying to answer the question of what masculinity might mean in today’s world – but are not any feministic responses.

Sergeant James, her main character in “The Hurt Locker,” Bigelow is a typical figure: an adventurer who puts himself in danger, because its only the rush of adrenaline can maximize. War alone is not enough for him, he deliberately seeks the multiplication of of danger: the deactivation of a bomb.
“The Hurt Locker”’s action is placed in Iraq, but does not take any point of view: for or against the US invasion. The film try “to crawl” into the minds of people in this situation, to make visible what normally is invisible to mortal danger. These uses Bigelow with great virtuosity using all funds of the classic cinema – hand-held camera, time lapse – and achieves virtually unknown degrees of intensity. Again, like other Bigelow’s works, the film is apolitical and amoral (unlike Cameron’s green and deep-dyed liberal “Avatar”) and drunk on the aesthetics of bodies in motion. At a closer look, it can be notified that Bigelow also do not show the interest in human relationships and psychology.
(Source: welt.de)

Is Kathryn Bigelow Hollywood victory this year is the beginning of the movie industry’s long-awaited appreciation for women-directors? It is hard to find the answer today, but it is good to see that the first step has now finally been taken.

Closer look at Kathryn Bigelow’s life and career according to moviefone.com:
Director Kathryn Bigelow’s small but impressive body of work has consistently dealt with issues of violence and tension. Originally trained as a painter, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute and was invited to study at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She worked as an assistant to the conceptual artist Vito Acconci and later joined a British collective called Art and Language. She did graduate work at Colombia, where she made her first short film, The Set-Up, a deconstruction of film violence, and Bigelow returned to this central theme throughout her unique career in the action genre. Her first feature, The Loveless, was a biker gang movie featuring the acting debut of Willem Dafoe. Teaming up with her frequent writing partner Eric Red, she made the vampire-Western Near Dark and the crime drama Blue Steel. After the mild success of Point Break, she gained some attention in 1995 for Strange Days, which she based on a story by her then-husband, Titanic-director James Cameron. After a brief stint in television (Wild Palms, Homicide: Life on the Street), she took a five-year break from Hollywood, not returning until 2000 to direct The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

After a six-year layoff, Bigelow returned with the Iraq War thriller/character study The Hurt Locker, a project that earned her the most overwhelmingly positive notices of her career, as well as an unprecedented win from the Directors Guild for Best Director — becoming the first woman to ever capture that prize. She also received nominations from The Golden Globes and the Academy.
(Source: Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide )