Oscars: Every Best Picture Winner Ever Ranked From Worst To Best

By Jack Pooley / March 6, 2018

33. The Hurt Locker (2009)

The epitome of director Kathryn Bigelow's career up to that point, The Hurt Locker made her the first - and currently only - woman to win the Best Director Academy Award, in an Oscar season that all-too-poetically pitted her against her ex-hubby James Cameron and his uber-hit Avatar.

As a super-charged meditation on masculinity and the effects of war, The Hurt Locker is one of the better post-9/11 character-driven war films, aided hugely by Barry Ackroyd's eye-wateringly good lensing and a Jeremy Renner performance that propelled him into the spotlight.

Though the film had a surprisingly short shelf-life with audiences and is barely talked about anymore, it's a classic war movie any way you cut it.