For Sandra Bullock, the 82nd Academy Awards night was set to be an historic occasion - but perhaps not exactly in the way she might have hoped.

While the 45-year-old American star was a frontrunner to win the Best Actress statue at the Oscars for her role in The Blind Side, she was also named Worst Actress - for a different film, All About Steve - at the rather less illustrious Golden Raspberry Awards, held 24 hours earlier.

Unlike most winners at the so-called "Razzies", Bullock, known for her self-deprecating sense of humour, turned up to the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood to accept it. The actress walked on stage pulling a trolley full of DVDs, before announcing that everyone in the audience could take home a copy of the offending film.

She went on to ask the recipients to rewatch her performance, rethink their decision and, if they agreed that it wasn't all bad, "I will come back next year ... [and] give back the Razzie".

Bullock, best known for her role in the 1993 thriller Speed, joked that she had been given the award only because she had threatened to receive it in person if she won: "I said I would show up - and then I miraculously won!"

Unlike The Blind Side, an American football drama that made dollars 250million at the US box office on a dollars 29million budget, All About Steve was a critical and commercial flop. With an approval rating of only 6 per cent on RottenTomatoes.com, the film is about a crossword puzzle writer, played by Bullock, who stalks a man named Steve. Near the end of the film her character falls down a mineshaft.

Fortunately, voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were willing to overlook the ill-advised comedy and nominate Bullock in the Best Actress category for The Blind Side, which pitted her against two Britons: Dame Helen Mirren, 64, for The Last Station, and Carey Mulligan, 24, for An Education. If she was successful, she would be the first actress to win an Oscar and a Razzie in the same year.

Other British stars at last night's (Sunday) awards event included Colin Firth, 49, nominated in the Best Actor category for his performance as a bereaved gay academic in A Single Man, alongside Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker and Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart.

Another prominent Briton featured at the ceremony was Hamish Hamilton, a Blackpool-born music video director. Viewers weren't expected to see him, however: he was in charge of the broadcast, which for the first time in 23 years featured two hosts, the comic actors Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. The big race of last night (Sunday) was in the Best Director category, in which James Cameron, director of the vastly expensive 3-D science fiction epic Avatar, competed against his former wife, Kathryn Bigelow, a contender for her less expensive Iraq war thriller, The Hurt Locker. Both films were also vying for Best Picture, in spite of controversy over negative campaigning on The Hurt Locker, which resulted in one of its producers being banned from the event - not to mention a lawsuit from an Army master sergeant who claims the film's script was based on him.

A win for either production would be historic: Avatar would be the first science-fiction film to win Best Picture, while The Hurt Locker would be the first win for a film about the War on Terror. A win for Bigelow would make her the first woman in Oscars history to land the best directing award.
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