Grade: A

After I saw The Hurt Locker I knew it would win the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.  It has everything on the check list – great acting, an interesting premise, a tight script, and that extra something raw and real that pulls you in and makes you forget that this is a movie.  Kathryn Bigelow deservedly won the directing award for her work.  She was able to really bring out the emotion in this movie – which I think can be a challenge when you’re dealing with soldiers in uniform and all the posturing that goes on with the job they have to do.  Jeremy Renner plays the bomb specialist, a little cocky, but for good reason – he’s good at what he does and he knows it.  The relationships between the men make sense.  The big scene that really brought it all to light is when one of the men is sent home, and he feels the environment is more surreal and foreign to him than the war.  It’s a movie to talk about, and think about, long after it’s over.