LOS ANGELES -- The Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker won best picture and five other prizes Sunday at the Academy Awards, its haul including best director for Kathryn Bigelow.
Bigelow is the first woman in the 82-year history of the Oscars to earn Hollywood's top prize for filmmakers.
"There's no other way to describe it. It's the moment of a lifetime," Bigelow said. "It's so extraordinary to be in the company of my fellow nominees, such powerful filmmakers, who have inspired me and I have admired, some of them for decades."
Among those Bigelow and The Hurt Locker beat are ex-husband James Cameron and his sci-fi spectacle Avatar.
Cameron was seated right behind Bigelow at the Oscars and joined a standing ovation for her, clapping vigorously and saying, "Yes, yes" after she won.
First-time winners took all four acting prizes: Sandra Bullock as best actress for The Blind Side; Jeff Bridges as best actor for Crazy Heart; Mo'Nique as supporting actress for Precious; and Christoph Waltz as supporting actor for Inglourious Basterds.
The Oscar marks a career peak for Bridges, a Hollywood veteran who had been nominated four times in the previous 38 years without winning. Bridges, who played a boozy country singer trying to clean up his act, held his Oscar aloft and thanked his late parents, actor Lloyd Bridges and poet Dorothy Bridges.
"Thank you, Mom and Dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession," said Bridges, recalling how his mother would get her children to entertain at parties and his father would sit on the bed teaching him the basics of acting for an early part he landed on his dad's TV show Sea Hunt
Bullock, an industry darling who had never before been nominated, won for her role in as a wealthy woman who takes in homeless future NFL star Michael Oher, who was living on the streets as a teen.
Bullock gushed with praise for her fellow nominees, including Meryl Streep, who she joked is "such a good kisser."
The supporting-acting winners capped remarkable years, Mo'Nique startling fans with dramatic depths previously unsuspected in the actress known for lowbrow comedy and the Austrian-born Waltz leaping to fame with his first big Hollywood role.
"I would like to thank the academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics," said Mo'Nique, who plays the heartless, abusive welfare mother of an illiterate teen in the Harlem drama Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire.
Mo'Nique added her gratitude to the first black actress to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, the 1939 supporting-actress winner for Gone With the Wind.
"I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to so that I would not have to," she said, adding thanks to Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, who signed on as executive producers to spread the word on Precious after it premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival.
Precious also won the adapted-screenplay Oscar for Geoffrey Fletcher.
"This is for everybody who works on a dream every day. Precious boys and girls everywhere," Fletcher said.
Waltz's award was presented by last season's supporting-actress winner, Penelope Cruz, who gave Waltz a kiss as he took the stage.
"Oscar and Penelope. That's an uber-bingo," Waltz said.
Though a veteran stage and TV actor in Europe, Waltz had been a virtual unknown in Hollywood before Quentin Tarantino cast him as the prattling, ruthless Jew-hunter Hans Landa in his World War II saga.
"Quentin with his unorthodox methods of navigation, this fearless explorer, took this ship across and brought it in with flying colors, and that's why I'm here," Waltz said. "This is your welcoming embrace, and there's no way I can ever thank you enough."
Up earned the third-straight feature-animation Oscar for Disney's Pixar Animation, which now has won five of the nine awards since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added the category.
Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin opened the show with playful ribbing of nominees. They also made note of Oscar organizers' decision to double the best-picture category from five films to 10.
"When that was announced, all of us in Hollywood thought the same thing. What's five times two?" Martin said.
Leaders of the Academy widened the best-picture category from the usual five films to expand the range of contenders for a ceremony whose predictability had turned it into a humdrum affair for TV audiences.
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