The whirlwind 24 hours that became the “great equaliser” of Sandra Bullock’s career
In 2010, Sandra Bullock‘s career went down in the history books, for better or worse, when she was the recipient of a dubious honour no other actor has been bestowed with before or since.
Throughout much of the 1990s and the 2000s, Bullock’s position near the top of the Hollywood ladder was cemented in stone. Hit action movies like Demolition Man and Speed gave way to beloved romcoms like While You Were Sleeping, Two Weeks Notice, and Miss Congeniality, in addition to dramas like Crash. Then, in 2009, Bullock starred in three movies that ran the gamut of success and failure like few other stars have ever done in the same calendar year.
First up to bat was The Proposal, co-starring Ryan Reynolds, which may very well be the platonic ideal of a romcom in the modern day. The film was an enormous hit, raking in $317million at the worldwide box office, and taking its spot as Bullock’s fourth biggest film to date. Later that year, Bullock starred in The Blind Side, a real-life sports biopic in which she donned a blonde wig to play Leigh Anne Tuohy, the adoptive mother of NFL player Michael Oher.
The Blind Side was also a massive hit, making $309m, but it also garnered Bullock something she’d not experienced up to that point: awards consideration. Suddenly, she was nominated for the ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award, putting her in the highest echelon of Hollywood’s female performers.
At the very same time, though, a movie released between The Proposal and The Blind Side came back to bite her. All About Steve, a truly abysmal ‘comedy’ co-starring a pre-fame Bradley Cooper, was a blot on her CV that she would rather have forgotten about. Instead, it earned her a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for ‘Worst Actress.’
Now, over the years, actors being nominated for Oscars and Razzies in the same year hasn’t been as uncommon as you may imagine. For instance, the likes of Melissa McCarthy, Glenn Close, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Walken, and Alec Baldwin have all pulled double duty. However, no actor had actually won both awards – until Bullock came along, that is. To her shock, on March 6th, she picked up the Razzie for All About Steve, and on March 7th, she became the toast of Tinseltown for The Blind Side.
Thankfully, Bullock isn’t one to take herself too seriously, and she accepted both awards in person. Hilariously, she arrived at the Razzies ceremony with a cart of All About Steve DVDs dragging behind her, which she jokingly handed out to critics she accused of never watching the movie. She then brought the house down by threatening to recite her awful dialogue from the film “until four in the morning.” The next night, Oscar in hand, she told Daily Actor that both awards would take pride of place beside each other in her home, with the Razzie perhaps nestled on a slightly lower shelf.
“You take the good with the not-so-good,” she laughed. “But, I had the best time at the Razzies last night. It is what it is, and you know, it probably means more that both of them happened at the same time because it’s the great equaliser. Nothing ever lets me get too full of myself. It quickly chops me off at the knees, and I like it that way because it keeps things stable.”
