Like its main protagonist — a hell-bent-on-getting-the-job-done-despite-the-odds demolition expert — The Hurt Locker overcame all obstacles to become the little picture that could at the 82nd annual Academy Awards ceremony Sunday. This low-budget, fast-moving, adrenaline-pumping drama took home six Oscars, including Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow and Best Picture.

This despite the fact that the $11 million production hasn't done well at the box office and had to endure a pre-Oscar blitz of bad publicity surrounding its writer and one of the producers.

To executive producer Tony Mark, a Santa Fe resident, there was an air of the surreal to it all.

"I can't help but think about how far we came from where we started," he said by phone Monday. "I think everybody involved with the movie is shaking their heads, going, 'Wow, this is beyond our imagination,' because when we made the movie, no one on the film thought we were going down this road."

The picture, scripted by Mark Boal (who also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) was shot in 44 days, primarily in the Jordanian desert. It featured a mostly no-name cast and used a lot of Iraqi refugees in bit parts.

The film was initially released in most American markets last summer and racked up almost unanimously positive reviews among critics. Mark credited those critics, as well as popular Internet bloggers, who embraced the film, with "keeping it alive enough to bring to the attention of Academy members who found it worthy."

Still, to date, the film has only made about $17 million, Mark noted.

The film hit some controversial roadblocks as it rounded the last bend in the Academy race. First, one of its producers, Nicolas Chartier, sent out an e-mail in mid-February to Academy members urging them to vote for his film and not a "$500 million film" — a reference to rival best-picture contender Avatar. The latter is the top-grossing film of all time (to date) and was directed by James Cameron, Bigelow's ex-husband.

According to Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences protocol, Chartier violated the rules when he sent out the e-mail, and thus the Academy barred him from attending the Oscar ceremony Sunday night.

Mark said Chartier was a "stand-up guy" who may have broken those rules out of ignorance. "To be excoriated for that was a punishment not fitting the crime," Mark said. "Having said that, in the humorous irony of the way the world works, for a long time nobody knew that Nicolas was one of the producers, and now everybody knows Nicolas! He's the famous producer of The Hurt Locker!"

And last week, soldier Jeffrey S. Sarver sued Boal and The Hurt Locker producers, alleging Boal based the story — and its main character — on him. Boal, who was an embedded reporter in Iraq in 2004, responded by saying he interviewed hundreds of soldiers to compile the story. Sarver is seeking $450,000 in damages.

Now that the Oscar ceremony is out of the way, Mark is hoping to film a screen adaptation of Hampton Sides' 2006 novel Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West in New Mexico. The book focuses on frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West.

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.