Will Kathryn Bigelow finally break the Academy Awards and Oscar’s glass ceiling?

Could she be the glass ceiling shatterer?

Many treatises could be written on why women seldom get nominated for the Oscar for Best Director. But with the Academy Awards now in their 82nd year, you still find yourself asking, “What the hell?” when confronted with the stark fact that the Director’s Chairs that get dragged up on stage really are mostly those that belong to men, year in and year out. Prior to 2010, three women have gotten the nod of the nomination for Best Director – Sofia Coppola for ‘Lost in Translation,’ Jane Campion for ‘The Piano,’ and Lina Wertmuller for ‘Seven Beauties’ all the way back in 1976. None of them have thanked the Academy for naming them Best Director to date. And if there’s any year where it rightly should happen, it’s for Kathryn Bigelow’s directing of ‘The Hurt Locker.’

Look, here’s the part where I blow my credibility and tell you that I haven’t seen ‘The Hurt Locker’ yet. I also haven’t even seen ‘Up in the Air’ or ‘Precious’ (although I did watch Allen Loeb and Stephanie Allynne’s amusing and amusingly-shot take down of ‘Precious.’). And much respect to Jason Reitman and Lee Daniels. But one of their films is an amusing diversion about romance, and the other functions as a focal point for white guilt.

Stacked against those two, we have three movies about wars – ‘Avatar’ and ‘Inglourious Basterds’ joining Bigelow’s flick. So I have to plead: If a director of a war flick is going to win the Oscar, can it at least be for the person who chose to direct a film that’s about a war that’s actually happening/not someone’s ‘how the Jews killed Hitler’ fan-fiction?

To some extent, we can already see where this is going. The Golden Globe for best director went to James Cameron, and the Director’s Guild prize to Bigelow. (I’ll leave aside the awkward fact that the two used to be married, and what that all means for this.) So you have to imagine that the more pop culture constituency that picked Cameron for the Globes and the cinema as art gaggle that awarded Bigelow will both be represented among the Academy’s voters.

The fear is that Bigelow could get blown out of the water by Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ because the Academy wants to vote for a film that was as much a logistical challenge as it was an effort to get great performances out of human beings (PS – Cameron only needed to get great performances out of computer-generated cartoons pretending to be Sigourney Weaver). We actually saw this when Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ defeated Ms. Coppola for ‘Lost in Translation’ in 2003. But I’m a little more comfortable with that decision, because ‘Lost in Translation’ is a story about some very fortunate people and the ennui they feel in a strange place at strange points in their lives. You know, as opposed to the competition in 2010 between Sci-Fi Dances with Wolves and a movie that reminds us about the horrible toll that our war in Iraq is taking on real, living Americans today.

(And anyways, Fernando Meirelles for ‘City of God’ should have won in 2003.)

Academy, please do the right thing. If there’s ever been a straight up merit case for a woman to win the Best Director prize, this is it. You can still go ahead and give ‘Avatar’ Best Picture and a gigantic stack of technical prizes. But half a decade in post-production just doesn’t stack up to a film that focuses on our more than half a decade of tremendous imperial misadventure. This is Bigelow’s moment, and if you take it from her to award a guy who mostly made sure that a bunch of big blue cartoons were properly contrasted against some 3-D glowing trees, you may as well be the cool kids dumping the pig’s blood on the fake prom queen in Stephen King’s ‘Carrie.’ Don’t be those kids.