Kathryn Bigelow

In the 85-year-long history of the Academy Awards, only four women have been nominated for Best Director. That's absurd. 

This year, the 77 percent male, 94 percent white Academy made it clear that they weren’t ready to recognize a woman twice for outstanding directorial work when they snubbed Kathryn Bigelow for her work on Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. Her new film, based on true events leading up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, snagged nods for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Screenwriter, but Oscar left no love for Bigelow herself. 

Let's get this straight: While Hollywood is still male-dominated, lots of women made excellent films this year. In stark contrast to the Oscars, women filmmakers had huge success at last month's Sundance Film Festival. The lopsidedness of this year’s Oscar nominees underscores the challenges faced by women working in the world of blockbuster films. 

The problem here is not the quality of films made by women. The problem is Oscar economics.

When Kathryn Bigelow nabbed the Best Director Oscar in March for The Hurt Locker, critics such as The Guardian's Richard Adams wrote perceptive analyses of the film's erasure of Iraqi voices.

Here's your weekly round-up of movie trailers from the Web, including Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, All About Steve, Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and The Last House on the Left... after the jump!