A Best Picture lock this Oscar season

It’s been 23 years since a proper military film (Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”) took home an Oscar for Best Picture. But now “The Hurt Locker,” a gritty exploration of bomb technicians in Iraq, is poised to take home the big one.

Divided into seven intense real-life scenarios, the sense that death lurks within every red and green wire never lessens. An action film at heart, it’s not the sort of film that usually comes to the forefront during awards season, which makes it all the more unique.

Director Kathryn Bigelow, whose past films include early-’90s staple “Point Break” and the sort of awful “K-19: The Widowmaker, flexes some filmmaking muscle during each scene, and mostly unknown Jeremy Renner is superb in the lead as Staff Sgt. James.

Extras on this single-disc edition are slim. Feature commentary by Bigelow and writer Mark Boal is welcome, but a brief mini-doc feels like an afterthought. It would have been nice to have interviews with actual military bomb techs or a more in-depth exploration of Boal’s own experiences in Iraq, but we’ll have to wait on an inevitable post-Oscar edition for this and more.

Fortunately, a lack of special features does nothing to diminish the intensity and immediacy of the film itself. Boal’s screenplay adds a vital authenticity to Bigelow’s technique and Renner’s gutsy performance, adding up to make one of the best films made thus far about 21st century warfare.