Even a computer error which appeared to signal victory for the American Anne Hathaway could not take the shine off last night’s Golden Globe awards for the British stars hoping to win the coveted Best Actress award.

Britons were set to dominate the awards in Beverly Hills, with Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire a favourite to take Best Picture – at the expense of Brad Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - while Kate Winslet and Kristin Scott Thomas were both in the running for Best Actress.

The organisers appeared to have given away the Best Actress winner by putting a golden asterisk next to the name of Hathaway – nominated for Rachel Getting Married – on the Golden Globes website 72 hours before the ceremony. A spokesman for the Globes apologised for the “random” glitch and insisted that it did not indicate who had prevailed.

As she prepared for the show at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, however, the excitement of Thomas remained undiminished. “I’m expecting to have a really good time,” said the Cornwall-born actress, 48, nominated for I’ve Loved You So Long, a wrenching drama about a mother imprisoned for murdering her young son. “It’s really great . . . to be selected among that group of particular actresses. I haven’t been in Los Angeles for ages, so it’s great to bump into people I haven’t seen for a long time.”

Although hotel guest lists are confidential, both Thomas and Winslet were sighted over the weekend at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. The hotel had its own staff of tailors and seamstresses to help fit the designer gowns that began arriving by special delivery at the end of last week.

Preparations began early yesterday to make sure the guests were ready by 3pm, when they set off for the show venue by Rolls-Royce – or for the politically correct, by hybrid taxi cab – having retrieved their tickets from high-security vaults.

For some, however, no special preparations were made. Boyle said he spent the morning watching the Chelsea-Manchester United game. His latest movie has been praised as a return to the form of his earlier work, such as Trainspotting, and is tipped for a possible Oscar.

This year’s Globes is more of an event than usual because of its cancellation in 2008 due to the Writers Guild strike, which shut down Hollywood for several months. Nevertheless, the organisers were acutely aware of the potential public relations problem of throwing a multimillion-dollar party amid an economic downturn. The aftershow celebrations were set to be toned down significantly as a result.

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