It started so well. A Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe award for her sterling performance in The Reader drew Kate Winslet to the stage in the Beverly Hilton hotel on Sunday night. She produced a piece of paper and coolly thanked all involved, finishing up with a nod to her children: “Mia and Joe, who are watching this on TV. Look! I won!” Then calamity struck. A second award, a Best Actress win for Revolutionary Road. With no written speech to guide her, Winslet rashly decided to do this one, as she announced ominously, “on the cuff”.

There were tears, there was hyperventilation (“Hhhuuuh! Hhhuuuuh! My God!”), there was heartfelt thanks to her agents, her hair and make-up department and her dialect coach (no, really). And, of course, there was lots of love - she loved her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, she said, voice breaking, with all her heart, while she loved her husband, Sam Mendes, the director, also known (apparently) as “babe”, even more and more. In short, it was memorable but it wasn't pretty.

It served as a handy if painful reminder of the manifold perils facing the Hollywood elite when delivering awards acceptance speeches. Here, in one concentrated burst of emotion, normally of 60 seconds or less (this gold standard was set by the Oscar ceremony producer Gil Cates in 2006 - the clock starts running from the moment your name is called and only genuine bigwigs, such as Winslet or Sean Penn, have the power to overrun), an inexperienced actor can reveal more than intended, a public perception can be altered and - worst-case scenario - a career can be thrown into disarray.

When Angelina Jolie, for instance, clutched her Best Supporting Actress Oscar (in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted), stared adoringly at her escort, brother James, and creepily announced to the world: “I'm so in love with my brother right now!”, it subtly changed her formerly media-approved “hot thespian” status (the Hollywood bible Entertainment Weekly pictured her on its post-Oscars cover with the headline “Euughh!”). She went on to star in the Tomb Raider movies but would not be taken seriously as an actress for another seven years, until her role in Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart.

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Similarly, Cuba Gooding Jr in 1996 became an awards-season punchline after he morphed into his Jerry Maguire character, the egocentric sports star Rod Tidwell, when accepting his Academy Award for the role. He leapt about the stage in Tidwell mode, declaring his love for the director Cameron Crowe and his co-star Tom Cruise. He hasn't made a popular impact since.

A year later, the neophyte stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck made an equally exuberant acceptance speech for their screenwriting debut Good Will Hunting. Yet they did it with just enough irony (even thanking Cuba Gooding Jr for inspiring the speech itself) to win plaudits and approval (and subsequently enhanced careers) rather than jeers.

The benchmark, however, for the career-wrecking acceptance speech was set by Sally Field. Industry lore, permeated with schadenfreude, has delighted in depicting Field's post-Eighties career lows as springing directly from her 1985 Oscar acceptance speech for Best Actress in Places in the Heart - “I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!” Yet Field is not alone. Forest Whitaker (“I want to thank God, who believes in us all”), Russell Crowe (“This dream is directly connected to my childhood imaginings!”), and Jamie Foxx (“My grandma still talks to me, only now in my dreams!”) have all made acceptance speeches that, as well as being emetic slush, have preceded notably fallow career stretches.

With so much at stake, it seems tragic that most actors (who, without a script, are a pitiful breed indeed) arrive at awards ceremonies clutching nothing but a vain hope of “off the cuff” inspiration. Tom Hanks, twice an Oscar winner, must have sensed the desperation in the ranks when he sent his eight-and-a-half-minute An Insider's Guide: What Nominees Need to Know video to all awards contenders before the 2006 ceremony. In it, he urged the would-be winners to keep their speeches witty, short and entertaining. That year's champ, Best Actress winner Reese Witherspoon, subsequently gave a speech that, although more than two minutes long, was smart, sane and mostly gush-free.

Finally, as this year's hopeful nominees look beyond Hanks for more direct inspiration, one can only suspect that the proliferation of alcohol at the ceremonies doesn't help (champagne is served at the Golden Globes, while there's a free bar at the Academy's Kodak Theatre). Did Winslet, for instance, down some bubbly between her two awards?

Yet even then, on Sunday night, the reformed bad boy and stone-cold sober Colin Farrell gave his own harrowing acceptance speech, for In Bruges. Here, like Winslet, he spoke at length about love and life and the meaning of it all. He made little sense. He may even have ruined his career. But it was certainly memorable.

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