I have been researching and writing a paper for my FSEM (Hollywood Films and History) on the historical accuracy of Kathryn Bigelow’s films, The Hurt Locker (2008)and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), both Academy Award-winning.  She is the only woman director to have won an Oscar for Best Director, which was for The Hurt Locker.

It only just hit me now:  why is the only female-won Oscar for Best Director awarded for a very masculine film?  Does a director have to make masculine films to win an Oscar?  Or were all previous female directors just not the “best”, and it is coincidental that a masculine film was the first to break the mold?  Such questions go back to the canon dilemma.  How do you decide what films or literature are the “best” when the “judges” are unavoidably biased by an ideology?  (Are they unavoidably biased?)