BRITISH winners dominated the early stages of the 78th Academy Awards, but this year’s Oscars will be most remembered for the shock victory by Crash in the Best Picture category.

Its triumph over Brokeback Mountain, the “gay cowboy Western” and hot favourite, was the biggest surprise of an otherwise low-key night marked by muted acceptance speeches and disappointingly few red-carpet disasters.

A gasp swept the Kodak theatre in Hollywood when Jack Nicholson arched his eyebrows and read out the result. Cathy Schulman, the producer of Crash, said that in “one of the most maverick years in American cinema”, her film carried a message “about love, about tolerance, about truth”.

But already the inquests were under way as to how the ensemble drama about race relations in Los Angeles, which had mixed reviews on its release (The Times gave Crash three stars out of five), had trumped its more fancied rival.

Larry McMurtry, 69, who won Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, said afterwards: “Perhaps the truth really is Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay.”

The Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan read the Academy’s decision as a sign that homosexual love stories are still taboo for the Hollywood mainstream. “For people who were discomfited by Brokeback Mountain but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, Crash provided the perfect safe harbour,” he wrote.

There were three Oscars for Britons early in the evening. Rachel Weisz won the Best Supporting Actress award for her role as a crusading diplomat’s wife in The Constant Gardener. She described her win as “a tremendous, tremendous honour” and thanked Ralph Fiennes, her co-star, and John le Carré, who wrote the original novel about corruption in the pharmaceutical industry in Kenya.

“He wrote this unflinching, angry story and he really paid tribute to the people who are willing to risk their own lives to fight for justice. They are greater men and women than I,” she said.

Nick Park, of Aardman Animations, picked up his fourth Oscar for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which won Best Animated Feature Film, beating Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

For the first time since 1990 Park did not wear a homemade bow-tie to the ceremony. Instead he and Steve Box, his co-director, accepted their awards wearing giant striped bow-ties and produced matching neckwear for their statuettes. “My wife made these when we were over here waiting,” Park said afterwards. “We were very nervous about it because we know how sacred the Oscars are.”

The award-winning Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who was born in London, won Britain’s third Oscar. He took the award for Best Live Action Short Film with Six Shooter, a black comedy about a man who takes a train journey on the day his wife dies and encounters a bizarre fellow passenger.

There was disappointment for two British hopes in the Best Actress category. Dame Judi Dench and Keira Knightley lost to Reese Witherspoon’s portrayal of the country singer June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.

As expected, Philip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor for playing the gay novelist Truman Capote in Capote. George Clooney’s Best Supporting Actor award made him the latest actor to receive an Oscar after a physical transformation, following in the footsteps of Charlize Theron as a dishevelled serial killer in Monster. He put on 2st 2lb for his role in Syriana.

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