Kathryn Bigelow wins Best Director, Oscars, connected to San Francisco

Kathryn Bigelow wins Best Director, Oscars, connected to San Francisco

Kathryn Bigelow tonight won the Oscar for Best Director for her movie The Hurt Locker. The movie itself, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture.

If you are traveling to San Francisco, or even if you live here, now there’s yet another reason to visit this beautiful city by the bay. You’ll be traveling to a city that helped Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow find success.

That’s because Kathryn Bigelow had a connection to San Francisco and she traveled here once herself. In fact she is from San Carlos which is half way between San Francisco and San Jose.

Yes, it’s true. A very talented painter, Kathryn traveled to San Francisco to spend two years at the San Francisco Art Institute.

She then went on at age 20, to win a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program.

She was later given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in a vault, where she made art and waited to be criticized by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag.

But she soon realized she could reach more people with her work in film than with her painting and
Kathryn Bigelow eventually graduated from Columbia's Film School.

Kathyrn was also a member of the British avant-garde cultural group, Art and Language. She is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian.

Kathryn Bigelow is the ex-wife of James Cameron, famous for movies like Titanic and Avatar. Both of them were up for the Best Director Award at the Oscars. Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win the award. Barbra Streisand said as she read out the winner’s name, “The time has come”.

Bigelow called the win, "The moment of a lifetime."

What did San Franciscans think of the Oscars. “It was well worth watching,” says Francis Witham, a San Francisco resident and world-traveler himself. “There are always surprises, even if you think you think you know who will win. You can never really be sure.”

On thing we can be really sure of, however, is that Kathryn Bigelow, and every San Francisco resident, is very proud tonight.

Re Travel: Travelers to San Francisco and Kathryn Bigelow, should she come back to visit her old art school, can find online deals at www.kayak.com. Flights fly to SFO from airports around the country and around the world. Should Ms. Bigelow decide to take a short trip to LAX to SFO, she can find prices as low as $49 one way.