I know! I was so sure of myself, wasn't I? And I said I would be writing a smug post-Oscar article when instead I find myself on the back foot writing a self-defending explanation of why I was wrong about the most important prediction - the best film category.
Also, all of my "Oscar ground rules" still ring true. In fact the reason why The Hurt Locker won best picture was because of them (rules number 1 and 3). I simply had applied rule #3 wrong and thought that Avatar would win.
So now I have defended my misapprehension we should turn to the matter of whether Kathryn Bigelow's war drama deserved to win best film and indeed all the awards it did on Sunday night.
Well Mark Boal's pickup for best screenplay was entirely deserved. The balance between drama and comedy in The Hurt Locker is nothing short of sublime. The palm wetting tension is built and then short bursts of humour allow you to pause for a second to wipe your brown before being plunged back into the anxiety. Tarantino talks about "playing" the audience like an orchestra with his writing, well Boal has managed this to an equal measure, if not superior.
However, none of this suspense would have made if off the page if it wasn't for Bigelow, the new most famous female director in the world. For that reason alone she deserved the best director award. Yes, there was plenty of politics involved with her being the first female director to win it, but it was deserved simply for the quality of her directing. Furthermore, there are little nuances she chose to employ that would have escaped other directors completely. An example would be during the highlight sniper battle where the background remains out of focus and is shot from the protagonists' view for the large majority of the scene. The main character takes a shot and the viewer anticipates the outcome with hung breath just as the characters do, staring through the blurry desert heatwaves.
Oscars that were maybe misplaced on this film? The achievements for sound and sound editing slightly jarred with me. Paul Ottoson and his team did the job to an unfailing degree but was it above and beyond? Was it extraordinary? The usual war sounds such as bullet whizzes and meaty explosions have all been done before. Compare The Hurt Locker's sound to the sci-fi epic Avatar in which the forest has more sounds designed for it than most movies do in the entirety and you start to wonder whether the Academy was hailing Locker simply for reason number three; more awards make more of an advertisement, they are market drivers.
Finally, should the movie have surprised us all and overcome Avatar for the best picture award? Well it was certainly the better film, so definitely in that respect. If it were up to me Avatar would not have even been in the running for the category. But was it the best film of 2009? Just out of the nominees I would have said An Education and Inglourious Basterds were of equal merit. Let alone foreign films like Let the Right One In whose only hope of an award is criminally in the "Foreign Language" category - as if a film in a language other than English is not capable of reaching the same standard, you would have thought the Academy would have learned after Pan's Labyrinth.
However, The Hurt Locker is probably the best war drama since Saving Private Ryan and definitely the best treatment of the Iraqi war on film. It also presents the more controversial story of a man who actually enjoys war and it never opts for the predictable narrative. And it might - just might - show Hollywood that you can glitz us with all the 3D gimmickry you want, but what really matters in film is a decent story and that is the past, present and future of cinema, and always will be.
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i don't wipe my brown in the cinema mate.
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