Opinion Little movies that could

So little David bests giant Goliath,in a year when the beautiful people who handed out the awards forgot the Academy’s strictly politically correct phrase “and the award goes to”,blithely replacing it with the older,punchier “and the winner is”. Even if The Hurt Locker isn’t the best film that has ever aced that category,the win is reason enough to cheer. Cameron’s film was more spectacle than movie,eliciting from the millions of people who put on their 3D glasses,a collective intake of breath. Yes,it blows you away,into a world that is home to tall blue people with pointy ears and long tails. No,it doesn’t move you.

What does,immeasurably,is Precious,for which Mo’Nique got the Best Supporting Actress award. It is about a young girl,brilliantly played by Gabourey Sidibe,a victim of vicious parenting and sexual abuse,and how she rises above it. They are black and dirt-poor,and Precious could easily have turned into a big movie cliché about colour,poverty and circumstance. It is the unsparing telling,and the brutally honest performances,as Mo’Nique put it in her succinct thank-you speech,that make it an extraordinary document of courage.

By rights,Sidibe should have got Best Actress,but it wasn’t her turn (it was Sandra Bullock’s for the syrupy The Blind Side). But just the visual of Gabby sitting in the same row as Oscar darling Meryl Streep,who was showered with much love even if it was clear she wasn’t going to get it this time for Julie and Julia,was a big strike for small-budget,intensely personal visions making it to the attention of the hard-nosed moneybags who bankroll movies.

The Academy has often divvied up the Best Picture and Best Director award between two contenders,covering itself in little glory. How can you have the best director not making the best movie? Kathryn Bigelow,who is James Cameron’s ex-wife,a factlet which has delighted gossip rags no end for the past several months,getting the Best Director evens out that anomaly. It also takes the awards to a place they’ve never been before: a woman holding aloft that trophy,for that award. It may not be as significant a glass ceiling as the first time a black actor broke through,but we heard the glass shatter,loud and clear,at the Kodak auditorium,and we are glad. Very glad.

As the ecstatic Hurt Locker team raced to the stage,minus the poor over-eager producer who was banned from the ceremony simply because he sent out emails dissing his “big” competitors,one of them could be heard over the din: “maybe now we will find a distributor”. An Oscar win means that finally The Hurt Locker and other movies like it,that get made minus blinding special effects and computer generated images,which is what most Hollywood films seem to coast on these days,will reach many more people,not stay on the periphery of art-house cinemas.

It also means that female directors will get to helm more of the sort of “serious” films that traditionally get Oscar nods. The Hurt Locker is a badass war film,with Jeremy Renner (who was up for a Best Actor award for his terrific turns as a bomb defuser who gets so turned on the knife-edge of combat that life back home,with wife and baby and shopping for cereal at the mall,becomes near meaningless) and his compatriots getting completely in the zone. Flesh is rent,blood is spilled,and Bigelow shows she can do it without flinching. So now maybe such brave producers like Weinstein and Miramax may be more comfortable putting together more “serious” films for women to make,rescuing them from perennial rom-com hell.

More power women. More people of colour. Finally,the Oscars are taking baby steps towards being part of a multicultural world,even if that world is confined mostly to the United States of America,imagined by Americans for Americans. About time.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com