(From left) Kathryn Bigelow, Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock at Kodak Theatre in Hollywood after winning their Oscars. (AFP)

Los Angeles, March 8: The Hurt Locker, a gritty, challenging and little-seen drama about bomb disposal in the Iraq war, was the leading winner with six Academy Awards, including best picture and the first directing honour for a female filmmaker.

The Iraq-bomb-defusing drama’s Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for directing. “There’s no other way to describe it. It’s the moment of a lifetime,” said Bigelow, who was only the fourth woman nominated for directing in the academy’s 82-year history.

The Hurt Locker took home the top prize, best picture, and four awards in other categories. Avatar, the 3D smash-hit directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron, ended up with three awards, all in technical categories.

The organisers had doubled this year’s best-picture contest to 10 movies to rope in more mass-appeal hits and boost the ceremony’s ratings; but The Hurt Locker, an emotionally exhausting account of an army explosive ordnance disposal team, stands apart as the lowest-grossing film in modern history to capture Hollywood’s highest award.

Sandra Bullock was named best actress for The Blind Side, and Jeff Bridges won for best actor for Crazy Heart. Mo’Nique won for best supporting actress for Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, and Christoph Waltz was named best supporting actor for Inglourious Basterds.

With US theatrical receipts of less than $15 million — about 2 per cent of the domestic haul of Cameron’s box-office behemoth Avatar — The Hurt Locker, like many other movies about conflict in West Asia, has sold substantially fewer tickets than several low-grossing best picture winners, including 2005’s Crash and 1987’s The Last Emperor.

Although almost every film producer and distributor passed on making Bigelow’s film, financed independently for $11 million, The Hurt Locker was among last year’s most critically acclaimed releases, and won any number of key awards in the weeks leading up to the Oscars ceremony.

The evening’s winner for best actress, Bullock, represented a far more popular movie, the blockbuster The Blind Side. Best known for crowd-pleasing (and critically dismissed) works such as Miss Congeniality and The Proposal, Bullock won the Oscar with her very first nomination for playing Leigh Anne Tuohy, the real-life adoptive mother of a homeless teenager.

Bridges, one of Hollywood’s most respected performers, won the best actor Oscar for depicting alcoholic singer Bad Blake in the fictionalised country music biography Crazy Heart. The son of the actors Lloyd and Dorothy Dean, Bridges said on stage: “I feel an extension of them. This is honouring them as much as it is me.”