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Kathryn Bigelow has emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars, after her tension-filled Iraq drama The Hurt Locker triumphed at the Directors Guild Awards.

Success at the DGAs practically guarantees an Academy Award for best director, which in turn boosts your chances for the best film award.

It is something of a turnaround for the director, whose previous movies have totally bypassed the annual awards season.

The Hurt Locker follows a group of bomb-disposal technicians working in Iraq. Based on the real life observations of writer Mark Boal, these soldiers speak of explosions as putting you in “the hurt locker”.

Bigelow shot the movie with a cast of unknowns, “so the audience wouldn’t know who among the three main characters was going to die by virtue of their public profile,” she said.

Her uncompromising attitude didn’t stop at the casting couch, either. Rather than using the non-descript desert plains of Arizona to stand in for Iraq, she went to Jordan and shot the film in 115 degree heat.

Not only that, she part-funded the movie herself – believing that a major Hollywood studio would not give her the creative control she desired.

Critics were gripped by the “convincingly blunt” action sequences and Bigelow’s “penetrating study of heroism”, but several criticised the decision not to take an ideological viewpoint on the Iraq War.

Bigelow contended the film was “not a documentary”, maintaining that her intention was to highlight the plight of soldiers in a war she felt had been “under-reported” in the US media.

She added that the script was informed by war correspondent Chris Hedges’ polemic War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning – which argues that war seduces entire societies, like a powerful drug.

As a director, Bigelow is no stranger to such moral ambiguity.

Her 2002 film K-19, focused on a Russian submarine commander who had to sacrifice members of his crew after a missile test went wrong; while the hero in Keanu Reeves’ surfer-cop movie Point Break was seduced by what Bigelow called “the darkness inside him”.

Artistic instincts

Bigelow was born in 1951 in San Carlos, California. Her father managed a paint factory, while her mother was a librarian.

The director recalls being painfully shy as a child, and pouring all her anxieties into art. “All my memories are of me brushing some sort of liquid on some sort of natural surface,” she once said.

She attended the San Francisco Art Institute in her teens, but was gradually drawn to film, and went on to study film criticism under Susan Sontag at Columbia University in New York.

“Painting is a bit elitist, while film crosses culture and class,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2002 of her decision to switch disciplines.

Nonethesless, her background in the visual arts is frequently reflected in the stunning, painterly backdrops of her films.

Look at the bold, moody skies of vampire film Near Dark (1987), or the ambitiously wild virtual reality scenes in Strange Days (1995).

She has tended to make genre movies that flip expectations – from Near Dark’s mixture of Western and vampire tropes, to Point Break, a bank heist film with homoerotic buddy-cop undertones.

Above all, her films are dramatic, immediate and crammed with action.

“Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological,” she has said.

“It can definitely propel you into an event and cause your heart to race… if that’s the desired response.”

Perhaps that should be expected from a director who has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, enjoys deep sea diving and, once, married James Cameron.

The couple were together for just two years, from 1989 to 1991 – and are now likely to go head-to-head in the Oscars race.

However, there is little animosity. They remained close friends after their divorce, with Cameron producing both Strange Days and Point Break.

The Avatar film-maker has already proved magnanimous about his third wife’s chances with the Academy.

As he accepted the Golden Globe for best director last month, Cameron said: “Frankly, I thought Kathryn was gonna get this. And she richly deserves it.”

If Bigelow is shortlisted for the best director Oscar, she will be only the fourth woman to do so (the others were Lina Wertmuller, for Seven Beauties in 1976, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993 and Sofia Coppola for Lost In Translation in 2003).

If she wins, it will be a first.

But the film-maker shuns the “feminist” label. “Strong women are fascinating to me,” she told one interviewer. “However, I’m equally inspired by men.

“I don’t look at these things in terms of gender lines. It must be odd to hear me say that, but I just don’t.”