Women in Entertainment 2010 - Power 100 List

When Bigelow took home an Oscar in March for directing The Hurt Locker, it marked the first time a woman had earned the honor. Pundits couldn’t decide whether it was more interesting to discuss the fact that Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron was pitted against her in the race or that a female won an Oscar for directing a male-centric war film. However, Bigelow has always shied away, though elegantly so, from discussing her work in terms of gender. “I think of a person as a filmmaker, not a male or female filmmaker,” she told Slate.com. “Yes, we’re informed by who we are, and perhaps we’re even defined by that, but yet, the work has to speak for itself.” Although seven years passed between her last film, K-19: The Widowmaker, and her most recent one, Bigelow has been directing since the early 1980s. The director, who went to art school to train as a painter, is in preproduction with Hurt Locker writer Mark Boal on Paramount’s Triple Frontier, which will star Tom Hanks.