The Oscars telecast may actually be worth watching this year, if only to see the look on Avatar director James Cameron's face when his former spouse Kathryn Bigelow walks away with the statuette for best director—a groundbreaking first for any female director. If Cameron manages to feign at least some semblance of joy on Oscars night, then truly, it will be the performance of the year.

A pouting Kanye West to Bigelow's composed Taylor Swift, Cameron was among the first to imply that if Bigelow does win the directing Oscar for her film The Hurt Locker, then it's probably because she's a girl—not because her film is any good. "I would say that it's an irresistible opportunity for the Academy to anoint a female director for the first time," he told MTV. "I would say that's, you know, a very strong probability," adding that, of course, "I will be cheering when that happens." That's mighty manly of you, James.

Having already scooped up the DGA and BAFTA directing awards (both of them reliable indicators of how the Oscars will unfold), the 58-year old Bigelow does indeed look poised to become the first woman in history to smash Hollywood's directorial glass ceiling. This will be a huge victory not just for women, but for American cinema—so long as the media desists from entertaining the not-just-Cameron-implied notion that Bigelow's gender is eclipsing her actual talent, and that the Academy, should it award her the Oscar, is merely throwing women directors a bone.

Because let's not forget that The Hurt Locker is, after all, a really good movie. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times pointed out, "like Peckinpah, Ms. Bigelow is brilliant at both delivering and dissecting male violence, which is why The Hurt Locker is at once so pleasurable and disturbing. You thrill to the violence even as you understand its horror, and your horror is doubled."

So instead of questioning Bigelow's talent on Oscars night, America should celebrate it, and allow Cameron's War of the Roses-meets-Mean Girls campaign to sink, Titanic-like, to the bottom of the ocean bed, where it belongs.