I watched the Academy Awards last night for the first time in over a decade. It was fun again to see the glamor and suspense, the costumes, and the stars.

But I was disappointed when the Best Picture award went to Hurt Locker, and I am having trouble finding the words. My best buddy Nataniel Eaton (and host to last night’s viewing party), thought it was a great film, and didn’t see any of the conflicts I had gotten hung up on.

So what is it about Hurt Locker that upsets me? It’s only a work of fiction, and I have always defended artistic license. I know that not every film needs to portray all sides. That can be for the next film to do, which is allowed because of our freedom of expression. But having the freedom to express doesn’t mean that what is expressed is automatically wise. I felt the movie Hurt Locker expressed a single sided perspective of a current war, and awarding it Best Picture overlooked all those people who have had their lives shredded by that war.

Fans of the film have told me that it didn’t express a single side. That it was a film about the ravages of war. That it didn’t make America look like the good guys at all, and that it did show the terrible effect that war had on the protagonist. While all of this is true on a superficial level (and no doubt a big part of why the film has such great ranking), I don’t think that these things are true on a realistic level, i.e. the realm of emotional investment where the true appeal of the film takes place.

The film is about a hero, undeniably. From the casting of the strong and pretty Jeremy Renner as Sergeant First Class William James, through the gripping scenes where giant mustached army men gush their boyish admiration for him (a scene that the Academy even included last night), to the splendid spotlighting of James risking it all to defuse defuse strings of giant bombs, it was a movie about a hero.

Secondarily it was an action flick, showcasing the awesome military might of the American army. The scenes of James walking up to explosive traps inside his ultimate awesome bomb suit captures the imagination in the same way a James Bond gadget would; a showcase of unquestionable technological might that wows the audience. Add to this a few of those gripping Hollywood bomb defusing scenes, and it’s a thrilling evening’s entertainment. And definitely a huge part of the emotional memory we take home in the end.

But Hurt Locker is superficial when it comes to the treatment of the actual ravages of war. Wars are not small and isolated things, like the unhappy family life of a bomb defuser (with all his limbs). Wars are vast and unfortunate things with hundreds of thousands of violent deaths leaving behind a trail of broken family members (often without all their limbs) who will never lead normal lives again. I wont say here that wars are unnecessary, and I will reserve judgment of the necessity of this war for future historians, but they are horribly unfortunate. The worst we really saw of this horror was a scene with a suicide bomber (who was instantly annihilated) and then the shattered marriage of the protagonist, a scene which was lauded as the “reality” that makes this movie a fair treatment of war. This is not a fair treatment. This is a smoothed over, sterilized Hollywood version of a very bad thing.

I have trouble with this film not because it was made to unfairly showcase only one side (the winning side), but that I can’t help but feel for those people whose children and other loved ones have been ripped to pieces by bullets and shrapnel. And especially those people on the other side, the side that doesn’t even have a Hollywood to tell their story, nor an Academy to give prizes. It’s estimated that a very minimum of 100,000 Iraqis have died in this war. Those people have families. How could this hero-action flick about a strong pretty American feel to these hundreds of thousands of people? Something tells me that it feels far from something they would want a tuxedo clad club of rich people toasting and applauding as the best film in the world.

The awarding of Hurt Locker for best picture was in bad taste. It denies the fact that hundreds of thousands of people might get a horrific and queasy feeling upon watching it. Where is our world view? Where is our compassion for the other humans? Where are we, this race of big brained monkeys, trying desperately to teach each other that we do actually breath the same air?

Hurt Locker? Boo. Technically a good movie, but a poor and insensitive choice for Best Picture.