Presenting the 2010 Academy Award for Best Director, actress and filmmaker Barbra Streisand announced to the audience at the Kodak Theater: ‘From among the five gifted nominees tonight, the winner could be, for the first time, a woman’. She checked the name in the envelope and, after a dramatic pause, she declared Kathryn Bigelow the winner. Although her gender was clearly underscored in this short but powerful statement, Bigelow herself made no reference to it in her acceptance speech. Instead, she praised her fellow nominees and emphasised the collaborative nature of her achievement, thanking the cast and crew who helped her make The Hurt Locker (2008). As she left the stage, the band, as though to highlight what Bigelow herself chose not to address, played Helen Reddy's ‘I Am a Woman’ – a song which became an enduring anthem for the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.

While many commentators in the mainstream press celebrated Bigelow's triumph as a female director in a predominantly male industry, the event also provoked a considerable number of negative responses. In her critical piece titled ‘Kathryn Bigelow, the Absentee Feminist’, Susan G. Cole accused the filmmaker of making no reference to the significance of her accomplishment for feminism and expressed her deepest regret that some ‘feminist bashers […] cheer her on for remaining resolutely gender neutral. They love the fact that she won her prize for a war movie that blows up, for being one of the boys, for telling feminists to get off her cloud’ (2010). Bigelow's acceptance speech and critical responses to it should not surprise us if we consider Christina Lane's observation that ‘her connections to feminism, as represented in public discourse, have always been ambiguous. She seems quite conscious of feminist politics and willing to engage with feminism, but she remains ambivalent about labelling her films in terms of gender politics’ (2000: 101). As Shelley Cobb also argues, Bigelow (like Jane Campion – another successful filmmaker and the only woman to have won the Palme D’Or at Cannes) often rejects the politicisation of her gender, while recognising the ongoing gender inequality of the film industry.