The Hurt Locker"s high highway to the Oscars lectern Jeremy Kay Film

Plucky ... Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow and Greg Shapiro with their Oscars for majority appropriate picture. Photograph: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

Avatar and The Hurt Locker entered Sunday"s Oscar rite similar to a Nimitz-class aircraft conduit and a boat firm for the same cube of betrothed land. The clearly incompatible opponents were the lead contenders for the vital prizes outward the behaving categories (Hurt Locker"s Jeremy Renner was a honourable carefree but it was regularly going to be Jeff Bridges"s night) and, of course, there was the combined piquancy cause of marital history.

The Hurt Locker Production year: 2008 Country: USA Cert (UK): fifteen Runtime: 131 mins Directors: Kathryn Bigelow Cast: Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Guy Pearce, Jeremy Renner, Ralph Fiennes More on this movie

James Cameron glided in to the 82nd annual Academy Awards at the helm of Avatar, Golden Globulised 6 weeks progressing in the majority appropriate executive and design categories and, lest we forget, the greatest movie of all time. Here was a man whose drive-in entertainment are so immeasurable they allot with clear articles and need usually traffic on one-word titles; the cinematic homogeneous of Oprah, Madonna or Beckham. Here was a movie whose $2.5bn(£1.67bn)-and-counting box bureau is two-thirds the distance of what Fiji"s purchasing energy was in 2009. Many believed the vital Oscars were Cameron"s to lose. But they hadn"t reckoned on his former missus.

Kathryn Bigelow, a means teller of tales and movement executive who had formerly served up guilty pleasures such as Point Break, Blue Steel and the in truth sensational, majority misunderstood Strange Days, valid to be a force. Her latest, The Hurt Locker, refused to upset in Avatar"s grievous arise and gamely stayed the march via the awards season. Despite usually grossing $14.7m at the north American box bureau (the lowest grossing majority appropriate design leader ever – Summit Entertainment is deliberation a re-release), the thriller had turn a vicious darling, hailed as the majority appropriate Iraq fight movie to come out of the US, and in truth the majority appropriate abdominal cut of fight on shade in majority a year.

Critics are so far private from blurb sensibilities they competence as well be vital on Avatar"s universe Pandora. This worked to the value of The Hurt Locker. Their indifferent thought in the anti-blockbuster authorised it to benefit movement so that, notwithstanding the Golden Globes shut-out, it had already reached the standing of critical Oscar hopeful. As the deteriorate wore on, and some-more and some-more critics" groups opposite the US – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, to name a couple of – rewarded Bigelow and The Hurt Locker, the star one after another to rise.

As the awards deteriorate entered February, electorate concluded secretly they had had sufficient of the blue-skinned giants. My own decidedly unscientific check of a small series of Academy members who spoke on condition of anonymity was revealing. Avatar had reaped sufficient rewards, they said, and it was time to honour a movie that done them think, changed them, and embodied a clarity of timeliness and timelessness.

Academy electorate are a nauseating lot and the thought of creation story is alluring. Enter awards dilettante Cynthia Swartz of PR group 42West. Hired by Summit Entertainment, Swartz devised a debate that righteously expel Bigelow as a shining executive who could hold her own in a man"s universe whilst raising the awaiting of the initial womanlike executive to win an Oscar. The thought was distilled and I can demonstrate to the speed with that it coursed by Hollywood"s bloodstream. Within a day of the nominations on 2 February, there was hardly speak of anything else.

For the record, Swartz additionally got people articulate about the man who proposed it all. Screenwriter Mark Boal was desirous by his time as a publisher embedded with US infantry to write about his experiences. He would additionally win an Oscar on Sunday and introduced a profitable component of flawlessness to the story, one that was manly sufficient to safeguard that the common 11th-hour trace of ill-founded lawsuits and threats of piracy that sully roughly each Oscar competition mostly fell on deaf ears. Besides, the members had already voted by the time majority of the crackpots came out of the woodwork.

Swartz ensured that Academy electorate perceived swanky DVD screeners. The critics awards kept on coming. Then on 31 Jan Bigelow became the initial lady to bind the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) award. By right away the clarity of story in the creation was irresistible. The leader of the DGA has left on to win the majority appropriate directing Oscar on all but 6 occasions given the Guild launched the annual esteem in 1948. The Bafta rite was a certainty booster, a skirt operation for what was to come, and by the time Barbra Streisand took to the entertainment at the Kodak entertainment on Sunday to benefaction the Academy endowment for majority appropriate director, Cameron contingency have been timorous in his seat. To be fair, the dual sojourn on great terms, and he looked honestly gratified for Bigelow when his ex-wife"s name was review out. Cameron is probably gratified for everyone these days – so would you be if you"d only done the greatest movie of all time and warranted a personal happening in the segment of $225m.

The Academy loves an epic, and on Sunday that epic was the story of David v Goliath. The majority appropriate design Oscar, The Hurt Locker"s sixth on the night following alternative comparison honours such as Boal"s screenplay endowment and the modifying prize, was a wise culmination for a heroic movie that deserved to be seen by a wider open audience. Thanks to a intelligent awards debate it was seen by a far-reaching assembly of critics and awards voters, and in the end, that was all that counted.