LOS ANGELES — The Iraq war drama “The Hurt Locker” won best picture and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, took best director in tonight’s Oscar ceremony.
With nine nominations, “The Hurt Locker,” a story about the perils and pressures of a U.S. bomb unit in Iraq, tied for the Oscar lead with the science-fiction epic “Avatar.”
The evening’s last two categories, best director and picture, marked the two films’ main rivalry, which is spiced up by a personal connection between “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow and “Avatar” director James Cameron. They were married from 1989-91.
Cameron took the directing prize at the Golden Globes, but Bigelow earned the top honor from the Directors Guild of America, whose recipient almost always wins the same award at the Oscars.
Jeff Bridges won the best-actor Academy Award for his turn as a boozy country singer trying to clean up his act in “Crazy Heart.”
The Oscar marks a career peak for Bridges, a beloved Hollywood veteran who had been nominated four times in the previous 38 years without winning.
Audience darling Bullock won best actress for “The Blind Side,” which brought her the first Oscar nomination of her career.
Both Bullock and Bridges already had won other awards this weekend. At Friday’s Spirit Awards honoring independent film, Bridges earned the best-actor prize for “Crazy Heart.”
On Oscar eve Saturday night, Bullock won the worst-actress prize at the Razzies for her romantic comedy flop “All About Steve.” A good sport about her worst-actress nomination throughout awards season, Bullock was a rare winner who showed up to accept her Razzie, tugging a little red wagon full of DVDs of “All About Steve” for the Razzies audience.
Earlier, villainous roles snatched the supporting-acting prizes at the Academy Awards: “Precious” co-star Mo’Nique as a loathsome mother and “Inglourious Basterds” co-star Christoph Waltz as a sociable Nazi fiend.
With the industry’s top trophy in hand, both performers capped remarkable years, Mo’Nique startling fans with dramatic depths previously unsuspected in the actress known for lowbrow comedy and Austrian-born veteran Waltz leaping to fame with his first big Hollywood role.
The blockbuster “Up” won the animated feature Oscar, and the Iraq War drama “The Hurt Locker” took the prize for original screenplay.
The short-subject documentary “The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner” lost the Oscar to “Music by Prudence.”
The first award of Oscar night went to Austrian-born Waltz, a veteran stage and television actor in Europe who had been virtually unknown in Hollywood before Quentin Tarantino cast him as the prattling, ruthless Jew-hunter Hans Landa in his World War II saga.
“Up” earned the third-straight Oscar award for Disney’s Pixar Animation, which now has won five of the nine awards since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added a category for animated features.
The film features Ed Asner providing the voice of a crabby widower who flies off on a grand adventure by lashing thousands of helium balloons to his house.
“Never did I dream that making a flip-book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this,” said “Up” director Pete Docter.
Pixar has a likely contender in the wings for next Oscar season with this summer’s “Toy Story 3,” reuniting voice stars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.
The country-music tale “Crazy Heart” won for original song with its theme tune “The Weary Kind.”
The song category typically comes late in the show, after live performances of the nominees that have been spaced throughout the ceremony. Oscar producers tossed out those live performances this time in favor of montages featuring the songs and footage from the films they accompany.
“The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar” lead an expanded field of 10 best-picture nominees.
Either movie would represent a first at the Oscars. Cameron’s “Avatar” would be the only science-fiction film ever to take home the best-picture prize. While war films have done well at the Oscars, Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” would be the first winner centered on the war on terror, a subject that has stirred little interest among movie audiences shell-shocked by news coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other eight films competing for best picture: the football drama “The Blind Side,” the sci-fi thriller “District 9,” the British teen tale “An Education,” the World War II saga “Inglourious Basterds,” the Harlem story “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the Jewish domestic chronicle “A Serious Man,” the animated adventure “Up,” and the recession-era yarn “Up in the Air.”
Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin opened the show with playful ribbing of nominees, including Meryl Streep, Sandra Bullock, Woody Harrelson, Mo’Nique, Cameron and Bigelow. They also made note of Oscar organizers’ decision to double the best-picture category from five films to 10.
“When that was announced, all of us in Hollywood thought the same thing. What’s five times two?” Martin said.
Leaders of the Academy widened the best-picture category from the usual five films to expand the range of contenders for a ceremony whose predictability had turned it into a humdrum affair for TV audiences.
Oscar ratings fell to an all-time low two years ago and rebounded just a bit last year, when the show’s overseers freshened things up with lively production numbers and new ways of presenting some awards.
The overhaul continues this season with a show that farmed out time-consuming lifetime-achievement honors to a separate event last fall and hired Martin and Baldwin as the first dual Oscar hosts in 23 years.
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