The day before she is favoured to win an Oscar, Sandra Bullock was crowned on Saturday with the dubious title of worst actress of 2009.
Bullock, whose drama The Blind Side has made her the odds-on favourite to claim the best actress Oscar, was given a Razzie Award for worst female performance in All About Steve.
No performer has ever won a Razzie and an Oscar the same year. Unlike most Razzie honorees, Bullock showed up to collect the award, dragging a cart of DVDs to hand out to members who she accused of never seeing the dud movie.
“Thank you for ruining my career with a very bad decision,” Bullock told the group, while threatening to read her dialogue from the role “until four in the morning”.
The actress played a socially awkward designer of newspaper crosswords, who falls in love with a cameraman (Bradley Cooper) and stalks him in the movie.
Organisers of the Razzies, an annual event that began in 1980 to spoof the glitzy Oscars, which take place on Sunday, also named Bullock and Cooper the worst screen couple of 2009.
Hollywood stars are rare sightings at the Razzies, but in 2005, Halle Berry claimed her award for Catwoman, and brought along the Oscar she previously won for her role in Monster’s Ball.
The Razzies this year also turned their inside Hollywood sarcasm on one of the biggest box office hits of 2009, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The critically panned blockbuster was named worst film, and organisers bestowed a second trophy of shame on its director, Michael Bay.
Special awards were given for the past decade. The 2000 film Battlefield Earth, based on the writings of Scientology creator L Ron Hubbard, was named worst picture of the decade.
“I especially want to thank the dozens and dozens of people who went to see the movie,” said JD Shapiro, a brave Battlefield writer who showed up to collect the award.
Comedian Eddie Murphy, who has had several box office duds in recent years, and Paris Hilton were named the worst actor and actress of the 2000s, respectively.
The so-called “winners” were determined by mailing ballots to 657 voters in the United States and 19 foreign countries. – Reuters