It was a long and tedious night in Taichung.

The 45th Golden Horse Film Awards show went on for more than four hours last Saturday and after a late start - more than 20 minutes past the official time of 7pm.

Here are the best, worst and worstest moments of the evening:

Most hardworking: Red Cliff star Chiling Lin sang, danced and showed off some gongfu - or tried to. In a tacky opening performance, she morphed from her Red Cliff character Xiao Qiao to an air-borne dancer (a la pop star Jolin Tsai) to a warrior, twirling weapons to a techno beat.

Later, she slipped into a mini-dress for a second act, as the good loser. The model-actress, who was not even nominated for Best New Performer for Red Cliff, presented the prize to the winner, Hopscotch actor Chiang Su-ming.

Worst odd couple: Hosts Blackie Chen, 31, and Carol Cheng, 51. He is laddish, she is old enough to be his mother. Together, they have no chemistry. Zilch. Worse, she was in poor form, straining to read her Mandarin script.

At one point, she said she had starved for a year to look good at the show. Oh, Carol, was the hunger eating away at you and making you mispronounce Sandra Ng's Chinese name Wu Junru as Wu Junyu?

Best odd couple: Pop star Wu Chun, 29, and Cape No. 7 actor Johnny Lin, 62.

When Wu gently proposed that his co-presenter skinny-dip to secure his Best New Performer win - swimming naked is this year's Taiwan showbiz trend - somehow the joke had a soft landing.

Life of the party: Entertainer Eric Tsang, whose banter and energy provided the shot in the arm that the show badly needed.

As the presenter of the screenplay prizes, he made things exciting with jokes directed at everyone, from the paparazzi to the eight writers of The Warlords.

When The Warlords lost to Winds Of September in the original screenplay category, he said the epic had missed out because eight winners would have meant too many thank-you speeches.

Most mediocre 'we hope no one paid for it' performance: It was a close contest between Chiling Lin's song-dance-gongfu show and male pop starlets Lollipop's song-dance-gongfu show, until illusionist Marco Tempest blew them out of the water.

He came on stage claiming he had teleported himself from the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, to Taichung. No one clapped. It went downhill from there.

Best actors: Blackie Chen and Carol Cheng. They sounded genuinely thrilled by Tempest's claim.

Best cameo: Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia. The former film superstar enlivened the night simply by showing up. She gave a long, solemn speech about her concern for Taiwan cinema, which co-presenter and director Lee Ang punctuated by quipping: 'It isn't that complicated for me. My motivation is to stand on stage with you and present an award.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Dec 8, 2008.