First woman to win Oscar in Best Director category
{Women’s Day Special}
*She beats ex-husband James Cameron’s 3D hit Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow makes her way to receive her best director award at the Oscars ceremony, 2010. Photo: Matt Petit/EPA
Kathryn Bigelow made cinematic history at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards by becoming the first woman to win an Oscar in the Best Director category for her work on “The Hurt Locker.”
While Bigelow has plenty of cause for celebration, her victory also provokes an interesting question: What’s next for the award-winning filmmaker? As of now, the 58-year-old director has two projects on her agenda, an HBO television series called “The Miraculous Year” and an upcoming feature film titled “Triple Frontier.”
In “The Miraculous Year,” Bigelow will leave the violent front lines of the Iraq War in favor of a street-level view of New York. The project is described by The Hollywood Reporter as a light family drama with a flamboyant Broadway personality at the story’s center. Bigelow will direct the pilot episode and is an executive producer alongside writer and fellow executive producer John Logan. Filming is expected to commence in May or June.
Bigelow’s “Triple Frontier,” on the other hand, has more in common with the gritty “Hurt Locker” than the comparatively sunny “Miraculous Year.” The film focuses on a lawless region of South America called the Triple Frontier, where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil intersect. In an interview with Digital Spy, Bigelow revealed that the movie would rely on some of the same visual techniques seen in “The Hurt Locker.”
“I quite like that style, I have to say. It allows for a kind of experiential filmmaking — it puts you there,” she said. “Somebody was writing about ‘Hurt Locker’ and saying that during the scene where blood is being cleaned off bullets, [the writer] was creating saliva in his mouth so that he could help, then he [realized] how ridiculous that was! There’s something intriguing, if the story provides the opportunity, about parachuting the audience into a moment that he or she may not want to experience firsthand.”
Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” collaborator Mark Boal wrote the script for “Triple Frontier.” During her acceptance speech at the Oscars, Bigelow praised the war journalist and screenwriter. She said, “I would not be standing here if it wasn’t for Mark Boal, who risked his life for the words on the page and wrote such a courageous screenplay that I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cast bring that screenplay to life.”
PLace here
