Obama’s Oscars Part One: ‘The Blind Side’ and ‘Charlotte’s Web’ too close for comfort

The Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, and what is abundantly clear is that several movies released this year capitalize on messages gleaned from Barack Obama’s campaign for president. HOPE was a calculated watchword that he expertly strode and sailed into the Oval Office. The nominees for Best Picture of 2009 are products of our current crises, from financial to social to environmental. The previews for each – much like the Obama campaign – promised to excite, engage, thrill, innovate and inspire. The bloom is off the rose politically, and after watching the ten films honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it’s becoming more evident that, in fact, audiences are more captivated by the murkier side of the messages they voice. They are all about HOPELESSNESS, even if they don’t intend to be.

I’m going to focus on one or two nominees each Tuesday and Thursday leading up to the Oscar telecast on March 2nd. Join the conversation in the comments if you agree, (likely) disagree or simply think I’m blind-sighted. And with that, I begin.

I’m starting with the picture that doesn’t belong in the company of its fellow nominees, quality-wise. “The Blind Side” employs a shallow, grotesque (let’s just call it misguided) form of racism dressed in antiracism’s clothing – in this case, football jerseys and soccer mom separates. Director and screenwriter John Lee Hancock’s (“The Rookie”) adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book has moment, pith and vim – and is fundamentally bogus. It depicts Michael Oher, a black teenager whose mother was a crack addict, who transforms from an aimless street kid to an All-American college football player with the aid of a wealthy white family. That’s all fine and good. The problem here is that Oher is the least interesting strand of his own yarn. Instead, the whole ball belongs to Sandra Bullock, whose portrayal of the Tuohy family matriarch suggests a community theater version of “Mother Courage” starring Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich.

Bullock is a hoot in the part. Ham is the plat du jour and she serves it with plenty of salt. But Tuohy and her family don’t have much depth – they’re little more than paragons of do-gooders, niftily bookended by their opposing forces in the film, the equally melanin-parched clan of heartless educators, ladies who lunch and more bargain basement bigots than “Mississippi Burning.”

“You’re changing that boy’s life,” her character Leigh Anne Tuohy is praised in facile, fatuous shorthand. She replies in kind: “No. He’s changing mine.”

Perhaps most damaging is Tuohy’s dialogue, which moves the plot along nimbly enough (it’s a credit to Bullock for being able to spit both steel and Magnolias at the same time during her readings) but also leads Oher’s simpleton through his crucible like a trail of breadcrumbs:

“This [football] team is your family. You protect them…

The past is gone, the world’s a good place, and it’s all gonna be okay…

As every housewife knows, the first check you write is for the mortgage, and the second is for the insurance. The left tackle’s job is to protect the quarterback from what he can’t see coming. To protect his blind side.”

Each line has the subtlety of the spectators raising “Go!” and “Stop!” signs that helped direct Tom Hanks at football games in his role as a cipher with a low IQ in “Forrest Gump.” Hancock’s movie (really it belongs to Bullock, who in light of her previous work, including her 2010 Worst Actress Razzie Award-nominated performance in “All About Steve,” has never been more tart and vulpine) is well-intentioned but backfires. It takes one step forward and two steps back with a lumbering gait.

The story line “The Blind Side” most recalls, in fact, is E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web,” which is about another beefy protagonist whose exploits are exploited by the narrative’s more interesting voice. “Some pig,” writes the kindly spider, in swift, succinct prose embroidered into cobwebs to protect her adopted sow of a son who was none the wiser.

She also brands him with the words “radiant,” “terrific” and “humble.” In similar fashion, Bullock’s Leigh Anne Touhy commends her own foster child: “Michael scored in the 98th percentile in protective instincts.”

Fumble.

Coming up on Thursday: “Avatar”