Kathryn Bigelow made cinematic history this week and is poised to make more.

On Saturday, Bigelow became the first woman ever to win the Directors Guild of America’s (DGA) most prestigious award, Best Directorial Achievement in Feature Film, for “The Hurt Locker.” And, as expected, Bigelow’s name was on the list of Oscar nominations announced this morning.  She is now the odds-on favorite to become the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director when the Academy Awards are held on March 7th.  The same director has won both the DGA award and the Oscar 55 times out of 61 years of overlapping nominations.

Bigelow’s DGA win for a highly praised but little-seen Iraq war drama over the highest-grossing film of all time was considered a shocking upset. Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron, recently won the Golden Globe Award for directing “Avatar,” and had become the presumed DGA and Oscar winner for a film that has enthralled viewers with an imaginary world created by state-of-the-art technology.  Bigelow’s other competition for the DGA award and now for the Oscar is equally impressive:  Quentin Tarantino, for his popular but controversial World War II revenge fantasy, “Inglourious Basterds,” Jason Reitman, director of the zeitgeist-y “Up in the Air,” and Lee Daniels (a rare African-American nominee) for the searing domestic drama, “Precious.”

Only six other women have ever been nominated for the DGA’s feature film prize, and in 80 years of Academy Awards, only three other women have been nominated for the directing Oscar:  Lina Wertmuller in 1976 for “Seven Beauties,” Jane Campion in 1993 for “The Piano” and Sofia Coppola in 2003 for “Lost in Translation.” All three were also nominated for the DGA award, as were Randa Haines for “Children of a Lesser God” in 1986, Barbra Streisand for “Prince of Tides” in 1991, and Valerie Faris for “Little Miss Sunshine” in 2006 (co-nominated with Jonathan Dayton).  None of them won.

While Bigelow’s Oscar nomination this morning was unsurprising, it was a shock that her low budget independent movie garnered as many total nominations (nine) as that ticket monster “Avatar” (which cost a staggering $237 million to produce and has grossed $2 billion in ticket sales to date).  The one-two punch of the DGA award and the multiple Oscar nominations (including for star Jeremy Renner for Best Actor) raises the previously remote possibility that “The Hurt Locker” may nab the Best Picture Oscar away from front runner “Avatar”.

One of the few women given the chance to direct mainstream Hollywood films, Bigelow is notable for eschewing the comedies and relationship dramas that most female directors (such as Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers) stick to. Instead she’s broken the old “No Girlz Allowed” club rules by directing action films such as “Blue Steel,” “Point Break,” and “K-19:  The Widowmaker.” Focusing on a three-man bomb squad in Iraq, “The Hurt Locker” portrays a virtually all-male world defined by macho competition and bonding, but also by the universal wounding of war.

Given the overwhelmingly male composition of the voting pool for directorial awards, Bigelow’s choice of subject matter has probably helped her to go where no woman has gone before. Despite the increase in female studio executives, producers and screenwriters, Hollywood is still a notorious old boys club that largely shuns movies about or made by women, treating every “Julie & Julia” and “It’s Complicated” as some sort of fluke rather than as the golden sign of an under-tapped market.  

While many movies aimed at women are flimsy at best and embarrassing at worst (‘Sex and the City,” anyone?), there are also brilliant filmmakers like Jane Campion who seek to portray women’s experience on screen with raw fidelity. Unfortunately, most toil in the fields of little-seen, low budget independent films.  With an $11 million budget barely recouped in ticket sales to date, “The Hurt Locker” is only a tiny notch above such art house fare in the commercial terms that are Hollywood’s lingua franca, despite being a rare combination of thrilling action film and riveting drama.

As gratifying as Bigelow’s breakthrough is, it’s only a first, tentative step toward Hollywood recognizing the value of both women’s work in film and of their lives as subject matter for movies.  Like many female trailblazers, Bigelow has won the respect of men by doing business on their terms and producing work they can relate to:  a movie in which scarcely a woman appears. Even if she triumphs again at the Oscars, it may be a long wait before we see a true "women's film" win a major award.