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As the 2010 awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Science (AMPAS) drew ever nearer, The Hurt Locker, Katherine Bigelow’s modestly budgeted war film set in Iraq which had recently become the insiders’ favourite to snatch the Best Film award from James Cameron’s Avatar, found itself caught in the crosshairs of two equally unhappy snipers.

 On Monday 1^st March 2010, the executive committee of the producers’ branch of the Academy held a special session following which it censured Frenchman Nicholas Chartier, one of the producers of The Hurt Locker who financed the film, for ‘an ethical lapse.’   The reason for the Academy’s outrage was an e-mail Chartier sent to Academy voters urging them to vote for his movie, and not a ‘$500m film’ – an obvious reference to Cameron’s sci-fi special-effects extravaganza.   Academy rules strictly prohibit anyone from ‘casting a negative or derogatory light on a competing film.’   As a result of his misdemeanour, Chartier found himself banned from the awards ceremony which was due to be held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday 7^th March.

 Chartier’s colleagues were not particularly forthcoming in their support for the mercurial Frenchman – screenwriter Mark Boal described him as a ‘reactive’ personality who made life difficult on the film’s set.   ‘It was a hard movie to get made,’ he told the Daily Beast, ‘It was a challenging shoot, and it's the nature of those things that tempers can flare and strong disagreements can arise. And Nic was eventually asked not to come back to the set… Everyone understands that Nic bears the responsibility for his mistake 100% on his own shoulders.’

 However, Chartier did find support from some quarters.   Nikki Finke, on her Deadline Hollywood blog, pointed out that his tactics were nothing out of the ordinary when the deadline date for votes loomed: ‘For months now I have been sent so many emails from so many studios and filmmakers and flacks and insiders badmouthing every rival nominee this Oscar season and talking up their own. This is the down and dirty system which [the Academy] doth condone.’

 If ticking off the Academy wasn’t bad enough, the film’s producer’s found themselves the target of a double salvo when Jeffrey Sarver, a 38-year-old Master Sergeant in the US army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team held a press conference in Michigan to announce he was launching a ‘multi-million dollar’ lawsuit against the film’s producers.   Sarver claimed that he was one of a group of soldiers with whom screenwriter Mark Boal was deployed in 2005 to write an article for Playboy magazine, and that the film was based almost entirely on his own experiences while serving there.   Sarver’s lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, who represented Doctor Death, Jack Kervorkian, argued that the film’s title was coined by Sarver, and that ‘Blaster One,’ the nickname of Will James, the central character in the film (played by Jeremy Renner), was Sarver’s call signal.   The lawyer said he had delayed announcing the lawsuit until voting by the 5,777 eligible members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences was over before describing the situation as ‘an historic injustice… Hollywood has made billions exploiting veterans.’

 Summit Entertainment, the film’s distributor, issued a statement in response to the allegations saying, ‘We have no doubt that Master Sergeant Sarver served his country with honour and commitment risking his life for a greater good, but we distributed the film based on a fictional screenplay written by Mark Boal.’

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