Every Best Picture Oscar Movie Winner Of 21st Century Ranked Worst To Best

Should have won!

Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to direct a film that won Best Picture, a historic and important distinction that's even easier to celebrate considering she won for The Hurt Locker. 

A unique kind of war movie that, on the surface of things, does nothing particularly new - following a renegade bomb disposal expert (Jeremy Renner) whose daredevil antics put him at odds with his team - but the fury and urgency Bigelow injects into its story is so engaging, so brutal and tense, that its predictable thematic material is elevated at every turn. 

Set during the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker is grey and morose, but also so thrilling that you're forced to watch wide-eyed as Renner risks his life with every threat he encounters, every brother-in-arms he clashes with, and every attempt at a normal life he tries.

Stylistically enrapturing, Bigelow's nightmare vision of war and its effects on the soldiers caught in its tumult is nothing short of breathtaking, a brutal character study in which a tortured Jeremy Renner somehow lost Best Actor.