Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman evah! who has won a best-director Oscar. It's always nice when a "First" happens because then we might be on the road towards that distant day when nobody notices the gender of the nominees for that Oscar. (Or any of the others, though of course actors are already sex-segregated into their own separate races. Is that actually necessary?)
I'm very pleased for Bigelow. Very. I'm also pleased because I read only a few months ago that the lack of a female director among those holding the little statuettes in their paws is a sign that women can't direct.
But I'm pretty sure that Bigelow doesn't want to be a "First." She most likely wants just to be herself and not some measure of womanhood. Once you are viewed as the latter there will be nasties who mutter that you don't really deserve the Oscar and only got it because of what's between your legs. Except, of course, if you happen to have testicles and such dangling there.
How I digress. I haven't watched "The Hurt Locker" yet but will. It's a movie about guys doing guy war stuff. The stage at the Oscars was full of guys with Bigelow when the movie also won the Oscar for Best Picture. It reminded me of Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet of all men. At the same time Bigelow really stuck out in that group of men's formal evening wear. It made her look like the Woman Who Has Arrived, and that was extremely nice in some ways, yet in other ways made me wonder if one woman in a sea of maleness can ever mean that for women in general.
Jeez but I'm curmudgeonly today. So be it. Perhaps the First Woman To Win The Best Director Oscar MUST do a movie about men with mostly men? And why can't a woman do movies on any topic she wants to, eh? I'm having an internal fight here, and none of this really matters if Hollywood treated women directors fairly and well. There's some doubt about that, just as there's some doubt about television and its treatment of women.