Were you surprised that Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for Best Director?

I was expecting James Cameron to win the Oscar for best Director. But I wasn't surprised that Kathryn Bigelow won. The Hurt Locker is an excellent film and she did a tremendous job conveying to the audience the message of the film.

Not to sound too pessimistic toward the Academy, but they seem to have a way of coming around to acknowledging people simply deserving of acknowledgment, and not necessarily based on a particular performance. I think Kathryn Bigelow is very deserving of winning a directing Oscar, however I don't think this was particularly her best directing performance, nor was it necessarily the best directing performance of the year. But the time was right for her and she deserves it.

I'll always remember Paul Newman giving tremendous acting performances for years getting nine best actor nominations and then finally winning for an OK performance in The Color of Money. How do you really rate a director based on the finished product that has been contributed to by the cinematographer, editors, sound engineers, not to mention the actors themselves. How can they tell just by looking at the movie that one director out of 5 was doing their job better than the other ones.

Did word leak that the others were slacking off on the set? Did Bigelow really work harder and better to get the job done? The only way to really judge a director's effort and ability would be to have each of them direct the same movie, with the same cast, and the same crew, and see what the result was.

That would actually be a really cool experiment. Re the same cast and crew two different directors and make the movie twice. Has anything like that ever been done before.

What about in film school. That seems like a cool college project.

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