Briefly explain how and why a film like The Hurt Locker illustrates the success of the Women’s Movement within the field of cinema, both on screen and behind the scenes

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. The conventional wisdom within the movie industry has always been that love stories, domestic dramas, and women’s pictures are made primarily for female audiences, while action films, adventure stories, and all-male genres like the war film are strictly for the boys.
2. But times have changed, as illustrated by director Kathryn Bigelow, whose movies are mostly
action genres. Her best-known work, The Hurt Locker, is a war movie with an almost exclusively male cast.
3. The story deals with an adrenaline junkie who belongs to a bomb disposal unit in Baghdad during the Iraq War. A reckless risk-taker, his swaggering bravado endangers his military teammates to the point that they think he’s going off the deep end.
4. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture as well as Best Director for Bigelow, two firsts for a female director.
5. Interestingly, at the 2010 Awards ceremony, she was competing with her former husband, James Cameron, whose Avatar was also in contention. When Bigelow won the two top awards, Cameron rushed to her side and gave her a congratulatory hug.
6. Though not a militant feminist, Bigelow is well aware of the industry prejudice against female directors: “If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It’s irrelevant who or what directed a movie. The important thing is that you either respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women directing. I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible. It is.”