Katherine Bigelow Snubbed By Oscars For Best Director

Zero Dark Thirty will not earn Katherine Bigelow her second Oscar for Best Director.

Bigelow first achieved such high critical acclaim for The Hurt Locker, a film set in wartime Iraq. She brought home the Oscar that year, breaking the glass ceiling that had long kept women from taking home the prestigious award for best director. Many critics believed that Bigelow was back in the running for a second Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty, but the competition this year proved to steep.

Bigelow, although proud of her accomplishments as a woman, gets exhausted by being defined first by her gender. “One does long for the day when it’s only about the work,” she told The New York Times.

And for Bigelow, no project of hers is simply about her work on it. Bigelow continally deflected praise onto the team that helped her mark Zero Dark Thirty happen. For example, she sings the praises of production designer Jimmy Hindle on recreating the Pakastani compound's “tight, narrow, airless spaces that would inform the performances.” She also describes cinematographer Greig Fraser, who pulled off her visionary idea to shoot scenes in night-vision, as "tremendous"

On Tuesday, the Directors Guild announced its nominations — the top award in America for feature-film directing. Bigelow was nominated alongside Steven Spielberg (Lincoln), Ben Affleck (Argo), Ang Lee (Life of Pi) and Tom Hooper (Les Miserables). “The through-line of her work is not violence, as some people suggest, but rigor,” said Rajendra Roy, curator at MOMA. “Over and over you see people, often young people, rigorously pursuing a goal.”

Over the last year and half, Bigelow has been rigorously pursuing the goal of creating a film that does justice to its riveting story.