Are Hurt Locker Foes Using Troops to Take Down the Oscar Front-Runner?
Another day brings another stumbling block for The Hurt Locker in its express route to Oscar glory. But unlike the idiotic, Avatar-bashing e-mail campaign that got one of its nominated producers in deep serious with the Academy (and may cost him his ceremony tickets, eventual Academy membership and/or worse), this matter has the distinct smell of awards-season dirty tricks. In a curiously timed dispatch in the L.A. Times, a number of military veterans and bomb-defusing specialists alleged that Locker’s treatment of life in an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit was not only inaccurate but disrespectful: Sgt. Eric Gordon of San Pedro, an Air Force EOD technician on his second tour in Iraq, has watched the movie a few times with his friends. “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh,” Gordon said. He scoffed at a scene in which a bomb is defused with wire cutters. “It’s similar to having a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle,” Gordon said. An EOD team leade
