Controversy hurts chances of Oscar favourite

Mar 3, 2010, 13:56 GMT

The film is inspired by real events and uses recently declassified information as it follows the lives of an Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team in Baghdad as they contend with bombs and other dangers. ...more

Los Angeles - Just as it seemed that Sunday's Oscar show was becoming boringly predictable, a slew of new controversies is threatening the status of best-picture favourite The Hurt Locker.

The low-budget thriller about bomb disposal troops in Baghdad is vying to become the first war movie to win the Academy's top honour in 25 years.

With a garland of prestigious wins already from the professional guilds that dominate the Oscar voting, most bookies and pundits have been certain that director Katherine Bigelow is on track for Oscar gold.

But now they're not so sure. As the deadline for Oscar voting passed Tuesday, the film found itself deep in Hollywood hot water.

Last week, Hurt Locker producer Nicholas Chartier broke Oscar campaign rules by sending out an email to hundreds of Academy voters, urging them to spread the word about his film.

'If everyone tells one or two of their friends, we will win and not a 500-million-dollar film,' he said, taking an unappreciated swipe at Hurt Locker's main rival, Avatar, beloved in Hollywood for both its technical and commercial success.

Few expect the Academy to take drastic action over the infringement. Though Chartier has apologized for his 'naivete, ignorance of the rule and plain stupidity,' his inappropriate missive could rob his film of vital support in what was always expected to be a close race with Avatar.

Some military veterans are also upset about The Hurt Locker, especially the way it portrays the leader of a bomb disposal team as a reckless adventurer with a death wish.

The film is nominated for nine Oscars, but Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says that's 'nine more Oscar nominations than it deserves. I don't know why critics love this silly, inaccurate film so much.'

Rieckhoff worries that actor Jeremy Renner's portrayal of reckless sergeant William James could become the dominant image of the US soldier in Iraq if Hurt Locker does well at the Oscars.

'Films, almost more than anything, will be the way Americans understand our war,' Rieckhoff said in a Newsweek article. 'So we feel that there is a responsibility for filmmakers to portray our war accurately.

Veteran war photographer Michael Kamber backed the criticism.

'The film is a collection of scenes that are completely implausible - wrong in almost every respect,' he wrote on the Lens blog of The New York Times.

Other veterans say the film gets their experience on the streets of Baghdad dead on.

'It took me back to Iraq almost immediately. ... It was tantamount to being there,' bomb disposal expert Tim Colomer told ABC News.

Screenwriter Mark Boal said the story came out of his own imagination, based on his personal experiences and conversations as an embedded reporter in an explosive ordinance team in 2004 in Baghdad.

'I definitely tried for dramatic effect to make artistic choices,' he told the Washington Post, 'but I hope I made them respectfully and carefully and with the goal of not making a training video or a documentary but showing just how hellish this war is.'