At the 82nd Academy Awards, Bigelow won Best Director for The Hurt Locker, the first woman ever to win this Oscar in the award's 82-year history.
On March 7, 2010, at the 82nd Academy Awards held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for Best Director for her film The Hurt Locker, a tense drama about a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit in Iraq. In doing so, she became the first woman in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards to win the Best Director prize, a category that had been dominated exclusively by men since its inception in 1929.
Bigelow defeated a field that included her former husband, James Cameron, who was nominated for the blockbuster Avatar—a narrative angle that dominated media coverage of the ceremony. Only four women had previously even been nominated for the award: Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Bigelow herself for the same film.
The win was widely regarded as a landmark moment for gender equity in Hollywood, an industry long criticized for structural barriers preventing women from directing large-budget or prestige films, particularly in male-coded genres like war dramas and action. Bigelow's victory demonstrated that a woman could direct a technically demanding, high-tension war film with the same authority and acclaim traditionally reserved for male directors. Her win remains a touchstone reference point in ongoing conversations about representation behind the camera, and it took eleven more years before a second woman, Chloé Zhao, won the same award in 2021.