The Hurt Locker ceremony, it won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Bigelow (the first woman to win this award), and Best Original Screenplay for Boal. "The Hurt Locker" is based on accounts of Mark Boal, a freelance journalist who was embedded with an American bomb squad in the war in Iraq for two weeks in 2004. The director Kathryn Bigelow was familiar with Boal's work before his experiences, having adapted one of his "Playboy" articles as the short-lived television series "The Inside" in 2002. When Boal was embedded with the squad, he accompanied its members 10 to 15 times a
The Hurt Locker "We were working with grainy Super 16mm film, editing in standard definition. We tried doing FTP downloads, but at the time the facilities in Jordan simply couldn't handle it." The producer Tony Mark later negotiated the use of a local radio station late at night to receive low-grade QuickTime clips over the Internet so the crew would not be shooting blindly. "The Hurt Locker" received universal acclaim, with Renner's performance receiving praise from critics. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 97%, based on 271 reviews, with a weighted average rating of 8.5/10. It was the second highest-rated