Sandra Bullock won best actress for her role as a tough-talking Southern belle in "The Blind Side" and Jeff Bridges won the best actor award for his role as past-his-prime country singer Bad Blake in "Crazy Heart."
Jeff Bridges won the best-actor Academy Award on Sunday for his turn as a boozy country singer trying to clean up his act in "Crazy Heart."The Oscar marks a career peak for Bridges, a beloved Hollywood veteran who had been nominated four times in the previous 38 years without winning.
Bridges held his Oscar aloft and thanked his late parents, actor Lloyd Bridges and poet Dorothy Bridges.
"Thank you, Mom and Dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession," said Bridges, recalling how his mother would get her children to entertain at parties and his father would sit on the bed teaching him the basics of acting for an early he landed on his dad's TV show "Sea Hunt."
"I feel an extension of them. This is honoring them as much as it is me," Bridges said.
Villainous roles snatched the supporting-acting prizes: "Precious" co-star Mo'Nique as a contemptible mother and "Inglourious Basterds" co-star Christoph Waltz as a sociable Nazi fiend.
Both performers capped remarkable years, Mo'Nique startling fans with dramatic depths previously unsuspected in the actress known for lowbrow comedy and the Austrian-born Waltz leaping to fame with his first big Hollywood role.
"I would like to thank the academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics," said Mo'Nique, who plays the heartless, abusive welfare mother of an illiterate teen (Gabourey Sidibe, a best-actress nominee in her screen debut) in the Harlem drama "Precious: Based on the Novel `Push' by Sapphire."
Mo'Nique added her gratitude to the first black actress to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, the 1939 supporting-actress winner for "Gone With the Wind."