And so it is that on the eve of this year’s celebration of International Women’s Day a woman was awarded the Academy Award for Best Director, the first time in the entire 82-year history of the awards.

About freakin’ time, too.

We’ll savour the moment while it lasts; it may not pass this way again for another 82 years. The world is what it is. We know this, don’t we? I mean, now that the first black man has taken residence in the White House, realistically speaking, what are the chances that will happen again anytime soon?

But back to Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making moment at the Kodak Theatre last Sunday night in Hollywood. Since dreams seem ironically to be more likely to come true in La-la land than they do in the real world, one can’t help but wonder: could it really be that there hasn’t been one woman director in the last 82 years to have directed a great film? Not one? That doesn’t seem possible, does it? A perfect little gem like Little Miss Sunshine, which was co-directed by Valerie Faris, comes readily to mind. And Something’s Gotta Give, directed by Nancy Meyers. Or even Bridget Jones’ Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire, and which was all the rage when it was released in 2001. There are also women-directed critical treasures like Sherrybaby, Personal Velocity, Monster, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Frida, American Psycho, 13 Conversations About One Thing, The Namesake, Waitress, The Dead Girl, and I could go on and on.

The truth is – and this is also true of the literary world, especially in the Caribbean – work by women artists is often not perceived as having the required gravitas. Unless a woman writer is of the calibre of Toni Morrison, say, her voice isn’t sufficiently loud enough. So I’m sure that to my male Caribbean counterparts, I write little stories, women’s stories that only women and gay men would care about. At least, that’s my impression, as well as the impression of many Caribbean women writer friends. As an aside, in Caribbean publishing, there are far more female writers than male, but whose books are promoted more by their publishers? Whose books do you see more of on bookstore shelves? And yet, which of the sexes reads more?

If a woman writes about themes like love and domesticity, and that sort of thing (and I’m not even referring to your average ‘chick flick’ here), she is perceived as being a minor writer. When a man writes about grander themes, like war and ‘masculinity’ and religion, it is immediately presumed he has more to say. Same with movies. Nora Ephron, the virtuoso director of romantic comedy masterpieces such as When Harry Met Sally, is constantly disrespected. I read a review recently that referred patronisingly to “inane Nora Ephron-type movies”. Nora Ephron, director of the recent instant classic Julie & Julia. When Woody Allen directs these kinds of movies, he’s called a genius.

This is why a holiday like International Women’s Day irritates me. I’m not interested in tokenism, which is what that’s about. Oh, let’s give the women a day to shut up their yammering about gender inequality. Then we can go back, for the remaining 364 days of the year, to not paying them the same as men, not taking them as seriously as men, making them feel like sexual prey in the workplace, and so on and so forth. It’s kind of the same jacked-up, patronising thinking that powers Black History Month, too. For all its defiant swagger, it’s really just an annual anthem of impotence, a proud race’s well-intentioned protest in the face of historical humiliation, but it means nothing, really, except maybe symbolically; there’s a hollow knowledge that there will always be another Henry Louis Gates around the corner. This is why there’s no White History Month. Those with the real power don’t need a day or a month in which to prove it.

Anyway. Back to the Oscars. I’m happy that Kathryn Bigelow won. Fears of the win being simply some grand token gesture seem unfounded because it’s a damn good picture. Kathryn Bigelow created something magical in her film about the Iraq war, The Hurt Locker. If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s filmmaking at its finest which manages to do what films about war seldom do: it doesn’t promote an agenda. In other words, it doesn’t take sides about whether the war was right or wrong. Instead, it looks at the war, or rather the effects of this war, through the prism of those actually on the front lines. In this case, from the point of view of the members of an elite army bomb-defusing team doing a tour of duty in a city where everybody is a potential enemy and every object a potential bomb.

Last summer, when Bookends reviewer Dwayne Woodstock insisted I see it, I politely declined. “Noooo,” Dwayne insisted. “You MUST watch this film. It’s the best film ever made about war.”

This was last year, when he was composing his ‘Best Of’ summer movies list. But it seemed like exactly the kind of movie I would be uninterested in. I rarely care about films that promote a sort of violent macho sensibility. But because I trust Dwayne’s judgements implicitly, I watched it. Let’s just say it speaks to Bigelow’s exceptional directing that a girlie-girl like me was sucked into the action from the get-go.

The Hurt Locker is not the archetypal movie that a woman would direct. This is not a criticism, but an observation. It’s gritty and testosterone-fuelled. It’s a subject matter women directors tend to shy away from. But Bigelow, who directed 1991’s Point Break, chose to do the kind of movie she’s always wanted to direct. Good for her. But while I congratulate her for her fine work, what worries me, in all of this, is a nagging feeling that her movie was sanctioned precisely because it was a guy movie that girls could watch, too. She worked on a broad canvas, true, but I hope that in the future smaller works that don’t necessarily involve explosions and brawls, and which just happen to be made by women, will also be recognised as perfect creations in their own right.