The Hurt Locker wins the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, along with Best Picture, Best Director and three other naked statuettes.

Wow.

I’m both thrilled for the filmmakers and kinda stunned at the same time. I love the fact that this “little movie that could” has, in fact, “did.” But is it really better than other great nominees out there?

From a screenwriting point of view, Mark Boal‘s script is an extremely taunt dramatic thriller, a fresh take on an established subgenre of war movies. It has extremely real characters, fantastic dialogue, and a real sense of immediacy. (It helps that Mark drew from his experiences as a journalist embedded with a real Iraq War bomb squad unit.) But, as I wrote previously, I was left wanting a stronger character arc (as the hero doesn’t learn anything by the end of the flick) and a bigger conflict.

From a directing stand point, I’m thrilled for Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman director to win the Oscar. She’s been around a while and is extremely talented. She pulled the strings at just the right moments to up the tension then pulled back . But is her work a bigger accomplishment than what he ex-husband James Cameron did with Avatar, a gargantuan movie that not only destroyed the box office but has redefined the very essence of 3-D movies and what can be done mixing live action, performance caption, and CGI? No doubt Avatar was a logistical nightmare from which he draw an amazingly thriller crowd-pleaser.

But should anyone really be that surprised the Avatar didn’t win any of the major awards? It is, after all, just an “sci-fi” flick, a genre that is looked down upon by the Academy. No genre film has ever won Best Picture.

Ultimately, though, any time a small indie like The Hurt Locker wins, it’s a good thing for filmmakers and screenwriters like me, guys on the out edges of Hollywood trying to bust into the inner circle.

Congrats, Mark and Kathryn!

My Top 8 now becomes a Top 9. I didn’t bump anybody off the list because they’re all stellar work. But at the same time, I didn’t put Kathryn Bigelow’s intense drama (about a U.S. Army bomb squad unit) in the Top 5.

Why? It just didn’t blow me away (pun totally intended). Don’t get me wrong: I thought it was quite powerful. And critics lavished it with all sorts of honors (i.e. Writers Guild Award for Best Original Screenplay), but I felt the screenplay didn’t provide much an arc for the main character, Staff Sgt. William James, played by Jeremy Renner. He starts off as a cocky cowboy-in-fatigues figure and — save for a subplot about him befriending a locale Iraqi boy — he pretty much ends the movie in exactly the same fashion.

Almost no change. Nothing learned. Zero character development.

In my book, that’s not Top 5 screenwriting material. But still, the script by Mark Boal offers plenty of good things: a strong supporting cast, an exotic setting, a timely subject, and an intrinsically butt-clenching premise (a gung-ho bomb specialist takes over an Explosive Ordinance Disposal squad and clashes with his by-the-book subordinates in the midst of roadside bombs, insurgent snipers, and unrelentingly harsh Iraqi environment.

Some of the praise should go to Bigelow, who does an amazing job of capitalizing on the hair-raising tension and mind-numbing lulls (much like real-life military life) with her mix of documentary style camerawork and slow-mo visuals.

But then again, that’s why both Bigelow and Boal received Oscar nominations in their respective categories, eh?

So I’m going to slap my back and congratulate myself for listing Slumdog Millionaire as No. 1 on my list of the best screenplays of 2008 and then watching the Oscars last Sunday as it won not only the Best Adapted Screenplay Award but also seven other trophies, including Best Picture (see the announcement by Steven Spielberg below).

I know that some of you might complain that it’s an overrated bit of Bollywood-meets-Hollywood cinema. But had you watched it without any of the media buzz or accolades, you’d have thought it pretty grand, too.

Congrats to director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, and the rest of the cast and crew on their stunning achievement.