She’s the One

Poor Barbra Streisand. Maybe you didn’t know it, given how rich and famous and garlanded she is, but she is an abused victim—a victim of Hollywood. She directed a movie in 1991 called The Prince of Tides; it was nominated for an Academy Award but she was not, and the shock waves sent tremors from Provincetown to the Castro. 

So it was meet and proper that La Streisand should have been the one to hand out the Best Direction statuette at the Oscars on March 2. And when she ripped open the envelope, she smiled and said “the time has come”—because a woman, Kathryn Bigelow of The Hurt Locker, had finally won an Oscar for directing a picture, a mere 83 years after the award was first given out.

The fact that Streisand was there to do the presenting suggests that the famously secret balloting for these prizes may not be quite as secret as all that. Something similar happened in 2003, when Kirk Douglas and his son Michael just happened to be on hand to present the Best Picture to Chicago, which just happened to feature Michael’s wife, Catherine Zeta Jones. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seemed to know that Bigelow was going to win, and wanted the most gratuitously snubbed female director in history to be the one to give her the trophy.

But there could be no director more different from Streisand than Kathryn Bigelow. She is an unusual “first woman” winner in that she triumphed with her work on a movie that, like her other pictures, bears no trace in its genetic code of having been directed by a person with two X chromosomes. The Hurt Locker is the most visceral combat movie made in the United States in this decade, and its sole female character of any import barely even gets a close-up.