The nominations for the 2010 Academy Awards, recognizing the films that were released in 2009, were announced on February 2 at 5:38 a.m. I remember because I got up early to watch them. That year saw Sandra Bullock nominated for Best Actress (for “The Blind Side”) alongside Helen Mirren (“The Last Station”), Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”), Carey Mulligan (“An Education”), and Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”).
The night before the Oscar announcements, however, the notorious Golden Raspberry awards, a.k.a. the Razzies, announced their nominees for the worst films of 2009. The Razzies are, of course, a hotly contested tradition, and it has many critics who point out the mean-spiritedness of the awards as well as its tendency to pick on pop movies and already hated performers. The nominees for Worst Actress that year were Sandra Bullock (“All About Steve”), Beyoncé (“Obsessed”), Miley Cyrus (“The Hannah Montana Movie”), Sarah Jessica Parker (“Did You Hear About the Morgans?”), and Megan Fox (for both “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “Jennifer’s Body,” the latter of which was an absurd choice).
And, wouldn’t you know it, Bullock won the Razzie on March 6, 2010, and the Oscar the following night. She is the only actress to ever win both awards in the same year. Luckily, Bullock was very sporting. According to a report in the Telegraph, Bullock attended the Razzie ceremony to collect her award in person. She defiantly handed out DVD copies of “All About Steve” to everyone in attendance, and announced her suspicions that the voters hadn’t seen the movie. They merely voted for it, she posited, so that she would show up to collect her award in person.
In a whimsical mix-up, Bullock accidentally took home a 30-year-old Razzie prop instead of her designated raspberry statuette. She ended up having to return it.
Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side and Worst Actress for All About Steve in the same year
In “All About Steve,” Bullock plays a crossword puzzle writer whose outsize personality and general awkwardness make her generally undateable. She goes on a date with the titular Steve (Bradley Cooper), and the film details their stop-and-start attempts at romance. It was quite a different character from Leigh Ann Tuohy, the arrogant matriarch that Bullock played in “The Blind Side.” That film was about a wealthy woman who uses her wealth for good by fostering a young football player and eventually adopting him.
“The Blind Side” was criticized as often as it was praised, with some viewers calling it a white savior narrative. Some critics were upset to see the film be nominated for Best Picture that year, and many felt that Bullock’s performance, while emotive, was tone-deaf. Was “All About Steve” really the worse film?
Bullock was the first actress to pick up her Razzie in person since Halle Berry, who won the award in 2004 for her performance in “Catwoman.” Berry’s “thank you” speech was brilliant, as she cried and thanked everyone responsible, lampooning her own Oscar acceptance speech from three years earlier. Anyone who shows up to accept a Razzie certainly has a good sense of humor about themselves.
Bullock, white the first actress to do so, was actually the third person to win a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year. Alan Menken won a Razzie in 1993 for writing the song “High Times, Hard Times” for the musical bomb “Newsies,” while wheeling around and winning an Oscar the next night for writing the song “A Whole New World” for the musical hit “Aladdin” (a movie that nearly didn’t get made at all). Then, in 1998, Brian Helgelund won Worst Screenplay for co-writing the Kevin Costner bomb “The Postman” before winning an Oscar for writing the screenplay for “L.A. Confidential.”
Neither Menken nor Helgeland appeared to accept their Razzies in person.
