The Hurt Locker is a 2009 film. It follows a United States Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team during the Iraq War. The film was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The screenplay was written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded as a journalist in 2004 with a US bomb squad in Iraq. It stars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty as members of a U.S. Army EOD unit in Iraq and follows their tour together as they contend with defusing bombs, the threat of insurgency, and the tension that develops among them.The film was shot in Jordan, within miles of the Iraqi border.
It was first released theatrically in Italy in 2008, when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. After being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in North America, it was picked up for distribution in the United States by Summit Entertainment. It was released in the United States on June 26, 2009, in New York and Los Angeles. The independent film received a more widespread theatrical release in the United States on July 24, 2009. Because the 2008 film was not originally released in the U.S. (at least in an Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles) until 2009, it was eligible to be judged for that year's awards, the 82nd Academy Awards held in 2010.
The Hurt Locker earned awards and honors from critics' organizations, festivals and groups. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won six, including Best Picture and Best Director for Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the award.The film also swept the 2010 BAFTA Awards, winning best film, director, original screenplay, editing, cinematography and sound.
Starting with its initial screening at the 2008 Venice International Film Festival, The Hurt Locker has earned an impressive list of awards and honors. It has also earned its place on more Top 10 lists than any other film of 2009. It won in six categories at the 82nd Academy Awards and was nominated in nine, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. It lost the award for Best Actor to Crazy Heart, Best Original Score to Up, and Best Cinematography to Avatar. The Hurt Locker also won for three Golden Globe awards. Kathryn Bigelow was awarded the 2009 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film for the film, the first time a female director has ever won. The film won six awards at the BAFTAs held on February 21 2010, including Best Film and Best Director for Bigelow. The film swept most critics groups awards for best director and best picture including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston and Las Vegas film critics associations. The Hurt Locker also became only the fourth film to win all three major U.S. critics group prizes (NY, LA and NSFC) joining Goodfellas, Schindler's List and L.A. Confidential.
The Washington DC Area Film Critics award for Best Director was given to Kathryn Bigelow, the first time the honor has gone to a woman. The five awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics was the most given out by that organization to a single film in the group's entire thirty-year history. According to the film-ranking website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, The Hurt Locker is the 13th most acclaimed film of the 21st Century. In February 2010, the film's producer Nicolas Chartier emailed a group of Academy Award voters in an attempt to sway them to vote for The Hurt Locker instead of "a $500M film" (referring to Avatar) for the Best Picture award. He later issued a public apology saying that it was "out of line and not in the spirit of the celebration of cinema that this acknowledgment is."The Academy later banned him from attending the award ceremony.
