(If it can be
difficult to remember what won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s
downright mindbending trying to remember everything else it was up against. In An Honor To Be Nominated, I’ll be
taking a look back at some of the movies the Oscar didn’t go to and trying to
determine if they were robbed, if the Academy got it right, or if they should
ever have been nominated in the first place.)
The Contender: The
Blind Side (2009)
Number of Nominations:
2 - Picture, Actress (Sandra Bullock)
Number of Wins: 1
(Actress)
When the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences increased the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten
back in 2009, it was supposed to increase the likelihood of audience-pleasing
blockbusters getting into the race. It was a move intended to boost the
ceremony’s dwindling viewership by giving Joe Sixpack and Suzy Chardonnay a
horse in the race. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible idea, although it hasn’t
really worked out that way in practice. This year’s highest-grossing nominee, The Martian, was only the 8th
biggest hit of 2015. That’s certainly respectable but not the kind of fanbase
that inspires the Titanic-level
passion AMPAS was counting on. Viewership for last February’s telecast was down
from last year, ranking as the least-watched Oscar ceremony since before the
rule change went into effect.
But the new rule did actually seem to have the desired
effect that first year. Viewership went up, with almost 42 million Americans
tuning in (as opposed to about 34 million this year). The year’s
highest-grossing movie did indeed secure a Best Picture nod (although, to be
fair, Avatar probably would have
received it anyway), as did Pixar’s Up,
which is still one of their biggest hits. But arguably the biggest beneficiary
of Oscar’s bigger tent that year was the feel-good smash The Blind Side.
Movies like The Blind
Side very rarely get nominated for Academy Awards. On the surface, this
belongs to the subgenre of inspirational real-life sports dramas that became
increasingly popular in the 2000s. Disney practically created an algorithm
dedicated to cranking them out, from The
Rookie (also directed by Blind Side’s
John Lee Hancock) to Miracle to Glory
Road to the more recent Million Dollar Arm. As much as Oscar is a sucker for a good biopic,
it doesn’t seem to have a lot of use for sports movies (unless that sport
happens to be boxing for some reason).
Even more unusual than its subject matter, however, is its
politics. People have complained about Hollywood’s
“liberal agenda” for so long that it’s no longer even a cliché. It’s now simply
an assumed fact. But The Blind Side
is unabashedly a Red
State movie, even if its
politics are more implicit than explicit. The closest the movie gets to party
politics is a moment when Kathy Bates, interviewing for the job of tutor to
Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), cautiously tells Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra
Bullock) that she’s a Democrat as though she were confessing that she’s a
convicted felon.
Hancock never foregrounds the movie’s conservative nature,
an approach that works for the most part and is often refreshing. The Tuohy
family’s Christian faith is neither denied nor overly emphasized. Too often,
movies treat religious belief in either a condescending manner or, in the case
of the increasing number of faith-based features, as a means to proselytize.
Here, it’s simply an inherent part of their lives, as it is for most people of
all faiths.
Even a later moment that invokes a more contentious
Republican issue works in context. Leigh Anne responds to a threat from a
street-level drug dealer (Irone Singleton) by warning him, “I’m a member of the
N.R.A. and I’m always packing.” That line is a lot more loaded today than it
was even seven years ago. But in the context of the movie, it works. It’s less
a pro-gun sentiment than an anti-bullying one, displaying Leigh Anne’s
protective, maternal instincts. It’s an important, effective moment precisely
because of how underplayed and matter-of-fact it is. Standing up to this guy is
not a big deal or a supreme act of courage for Bullock’s character. It’s simply
the way she goes through her life every day.
The Blind Side
does a lot of things well, especially in its depiction of Leigh Anne Tuohy and
her family. And that’s great but it also ends up turning Michael Oher into an
observer to his own story. A lot could be said about where this movie fits in
to the long history of “White Savior” films. But the fact that this is based on
a true story makes that a trickier landscape to negotiate. I have no doubt that
Michael Oher loves his family very much. But I’m also quite confident that his
rise to football stardom wasn’t just the result of genetics and a
puppy-dog-like devotion to protecting the people he cares about, which is
essentially what the movie suggests.
Quinton Aaron plays Oher as a sweet, shy, instantly likable
guy. With his soft eyes and wounded expression, he may be the least
intimidating 6’8” giant in movie history. And for all the adversity and
hardship Oher had to overcome as a kid, almost none of it is actually in the
movie. Literally everybody likes him to some degree, even the dealers and
addicts in his old neighborhood. They only threaten him after he loses his
temper on them defending his new adopted family. If The Blind Side has any bad guys, it’s just the abstract concepts of
Ignorance, Poverty and Racism.
In many ways, race is The
Blind Side’s blind side. Apart from Aaron, practically the only people of color
are the people who live below the very clean and art-directed poverty line on
the other side of the tracks. Which is odd, considering that Oher is brought to
Wingate Christian School
by an African-American mechanic trying to enroll his own son as well as Big
Mike. The school’s board of admissions quickly approves the other boy but he’s
never seen or heard of again. The film goes to great, almost absurd lengths to
isolate Michael when it really doesn’t need to. What it ought to do instead is
put us in his head so we can feel the drive and survival skills he clearly
possessed. He’s far too passive for too much of the film.
But the filmmakers clearly decided early on that they
weren’t making The Michael Oher Story.
This is The Leigh Anne Tuohy Story
but even there, it’s only marginally successful. Sandra Bullock’s nomination
(and win) for Best Actress was considerably less of a surprise than the movie’s
Best Picture nod. Here was a very well-liked movie star in a juicy role that
played to all of the strengths and attributes that made her an audience
favorite in the first place. The Oscar was practically a foregone conclusion.
But it’s a bit of a curious role in that it doesn’t really have a dramatic arc.
Bullock nails the character and is extremely effective and moving in moments
tamping her emotions down beneath her all-business exterior. But when one of
her ladies-who-lunch friends comments, “You’re changing that boy’s life,” her
response (“No. He’s changing mine.”) feels more like it was dictated by the
Screenwriter’s Bible than a genuine reply. By the end of the movie, she seems
like pretty much the same person she was to begin with, only now she has an
adopted son.
Had it been released a year earlier, The Blind Side would probably not have received a Best Picture
nomination (although Bullock would certainly still have been a contender in her
category). While it’s hard to argue with the movie’s crowd-pleasing success,
John Lee Hancock isn’t a particularly inspired or challenging filmmaker. There
are important issues to deal with inside The
Blind Side but the movie itself is uninterested and incapable of addressing
them. And maybe that’s OK. After all, there are plenty of other movies capable
of taking a more nuanced look at these themes and ideas. But there’s nothing
inherently wrong with a movie that simply wants its audience to be a little bit
more compassionate toward each other.
The Blind Side is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Home Video.
