SANDRA Bullock and Jeff Bridges have won the best acting Oscars, but The Hurt Locker dominated the ceremony with a raft of awards including best picture. Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker beat its major rival, sci-fi blockbuster Avatar, by winning five other prizes at the Academy Awards. They included best director for Kathryn Bigelow, who beat ex-husband and Avatar director James Cameron, for the gong.

Bigelow is the first woman in the 82-year history of the Oscars to earn Hollywood’s top prize for filmmakers.

“This is so extraordinary to be in the company of such powerful filmmakers,” Bigelow told the audience.

“This is the moment of a lifetime.”

First-time winners took all four acting prizes: Sandra Bullock as best actress for The Blind Side; Jeff Bridges as best actor for Crazy Heart’; Mo’Nique as supporting actress for Precious; and Austrian Christoph Waltz as supporting actor for Inglourious Basterds.

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, who played a boozy country singer trying to clean up his act, 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 role 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.

Bullock, an industry darling who had never before been nominated, won for her role as a real-life wealthy woman who takes in homeless future football star Michael Oher, who was living on the streets as a teen.

The award wraps up a wild year for Bullock, who had box-office smashes with Blind Side and The Proposal and a flop with All About Steve, which earned her the worst-actress trophy at the Razzies the night before the Oscars.

“Did I really earn this or did I just wear you all down?” Bullock asked the Oscar crowd. Bullock gushed with praise for her fellow nominees, including Meryl Streep, who she joked is “such a good kisser.”

The supporting-acting winners capped remarkable years, Mo’Nique startling fans with dramatic depths previously unsuspected in the actress known for lowbrow comedy and 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 mother of an illiterate teen in the Harlem drama Precious.

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.

“I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to so that I would not have to,” she said, adding thanks to Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, who signed on as executive producers to spread the word on Precious after it premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Precious also won the adapted-screenplay Oscar for Geoffrey Fletcher.

An introduction of lead acting nominees and a song-and-dance number by Neil Patrick Harris opened the Oscars show before hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin took over.

Among the first to arrive on the red carpet was Aussie actor Sam Worthington – the star of Avatar – as the parade of A-listers got under way at the Kodak Theatre.

A torrential downpour greeted guests, who were shielded from the rain by a protective canopy.

Worthington meanwhile admitted that the glitz and glamour of the Oscars was a far cry from the early stages of his career.

“I was living in a car,” he joked, saying he was hoping attendance at the Oscars would boost his career prospects.

“I just need another job,” Worthington told E! television. “This is all part of it. You put your monkey suit on and try and get another job.”

I’m so honoured to be in the same conversation as him,” she said.