Author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis took to Twitter on Wednesday night to share some thoughts about "Zero Dark Thirty," claiming the film's director, Kathryn Bigelow, is only given critical praise because she's a female.
"Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man," he wrote. "But since she's a very hot woman she's really overrated."
Bigelow won the Oscar for Best Director in 2010 for "The Hurt Locker," a gritty look into the Iraq War. Bigelow linked up with "Hurt Locker" screenwriter Mark Boal again for this year's "Zero Dark Thirty," which focuses on raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. The film is being hailed as another Oscar favorite and has already been named as the best film of 2012 by the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review.
Condemnation came swiftly as a number of Twitter users mocked Ellis' claim. Multiple Twitter users said Ellis was actually the one who is overrated, while others simply expressed shock that he would be so brash.
Those surprised by Ellis' tweet, however, probably haven't been following his account for long. Huffington Post Books Editor Andrew Losowsky took Ellis to task in September, in a post titled "Why We're Unfollowing Bret Easton Ellis":
Last year, he compared watching TV show Glee to "stepping in a puddle of HIV." Last month, he said on Twitter that an actor was too openly gay to play a heterosexual character. In July he called an unpopular figure "a complete and total old-school fucking Hollywood loser." When JD Salinger died, he tweeted "Yeah!! Thank God he's finally dead. I've been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!" Today he called David Foster Wallace (who didn't like Easton Ellis's work either) "the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation."
Here are his Bigelow tweets, followed by one popular response:
