A few years ago I was staying for a night in a motel in the vicinity of the Washington airport. Breakfast included. USA Today placed before my door as is customary for this kind of American establishment.  I read this snapshot of American life at the breakfast table. Next to me sits a man in his early 30. He is looking for conversation and connection. After training in Texas he is being shipped out to Iraq via this airport. The politicians make the decisions. We just hope that we are doing the right thing.  His IQ is in the lower ranges. I come to share the trace of fearfulness about his future that has enveloped his being. “Can I have your email address so that I can write from Iraq,” he asks me.  How can I say ‘no’. I never heard from him again. There are two possibilities: Everything went so well that he didn’t feel the need to write. Or he simply got himself killed soon after he arrived in Iraq.

I have not thought about the fellow until I saw The Hurt Locker. There is nothing flashy about the film. Its mission is to make you experience is vividly as possible what it is like to fear for your life on every single mission to take out bombs before they blow up people. The film achieves this objective well. But you really need to want to send a political message to give the Oscar to this film rather than to Avatar, the stunning movie spectacle that takes the medium to another level. Moviegoers have voted with their buds: in the U.S. The Hurt Lockertook only in approximately 2% of the Avatar ticket sales.  Perhaps is was not just a political message the voters of the Academy wanted to send. Perhaps they simply wanted to restore the balance of power between the sexes by giving Kathryn Bigelow, first female director to win Oscar for best picture and best director. She is the former wife of James Cameron and I suspect that he preferred to lose the Oscar to his former wife rather than some other rival.  Call it the Cameron family Hurt Stopper.