All questions are coming from the Changemakers Twitter following of 300,000, as well as entrants in the corresponding Women, Tools, Technology campaign.

Audio recordings of each interview will be posted to www.changemakers.com around 5pm EDT June 14, 15 and 16.

Questions for Harris, Touby and Krumholz can be still sent via Twitter @changemakers with the hashtag #WTTlivechange

The enterprise starts with a bang: Tony descends (literally) upon the Stark Expo, which is basically a Trumped-up variation on the MacWorld conference crossed with a Richard Branson-style showcase. There are promises of new technological developments (because the Iron Man suit is really all there is, so building an entire expo around it baffles a bit) and Rockette-like dancers to generate the figurative sparks that complement our protagonist’s panache for generating literal ones. Why Stark Expo needs to feature an enormous Oracle banner wrapped around the biosphere at its epicenter is a mystery. Larry Ellison, the real-life CEO of the aforementioned corporation who bears many of the personal – and apparently physical – traits of the fictional CEO, makes a cameo. Cute cross-marketing campaign, I might add. The implication is that Oracle’s brand is enveloping the world like a great big hug.

Later on we get Tony roasting a televised Senate committee hearing, where he boasts that he has “successfully privatized world peace.” How Cheneyesque. And this ushers in the latest action movie archetype: the supermarkethero.

If Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was a modernist, chiaroscuro Gothicism—painted shadows, grotesquery and even a Picasso-esque demonic clown thrown in for good measure—the first Iron Man felt like animated contemporary Pop art, bright, spare and flippant. Credit the fleet (but never flashy) director, Jon Favreau, for the refreshing take. Much of the original film’s tone has been reinstated in the sequel, but in fits and starts.

Iron Man 2 isn’t a bad movie, if for no other reason than it defies the classification. It isn’t a movie at all, in fact, but rather a collection of Oracle commercials, military propagandist featurettes and upcoming summer blockbuster teasers, wrapped in soliloquies and packaged delectably. It feels alternately timely, prophetic and retrograde.

To wit: We are immersed in the Cold War once again, courtesy of a prologue that depicts the technology behind the Iron Man weapon as a collaborative effort between American and Soviet military physicists. The subject is drilled into our heads thanks to Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of the brilliant but blighted progeny of the seemingly betrayed Siberian who co-authored the project with Tony Stark’s father. His accent, so thick you could trip over it (though he never does) is abetted by the soundtrack’s thunderous Russian war dirges, and his name is (I swear) Ivan. He’s the new kid on the Soviet Bloc. Only adding to the bluntness is the movie’s addition of a time capsule filled with film reels narrated by Stark’s father. It doesn’t help that he’s played by the wonderful John Slattery, who will forever be recognized as a partner at Sterling Cooper in that trendy mock-time capsule Mad Men.

Then there’s Scarlett Johansson, whose scenes are edited to suggest a Clairol commercial directed by the Wachowski brothers. She seizes every opportunity to divorce herself from any interactions with the ensemble other than when she’s tossing them out of her way. (Her hair, it must be noted, is the movie’s single greatest special effect, with its coils of tendrils bouncing and twirling at will, like Medusa’s python follicles.)

Why she’s even in the picture is not important – it’s nice to see her teasing the upcoming Avengers movie with her future costar  Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who shows up halfway through. It’s at this point that Tony references a shield found in his laboratory – which is coincidentally the name of the little club of do-gooders who plan to start Avenging in a future spin-off. He calls the shield the key to his survival, and all we can do is rap our fingers and wait. The brilliant Clark Gregg is tasked with providing the only bits of intrigue by telegraphing obvious movie tie-ins and foreshadowing immediate inevitable conflicts.

It’s all executed with aplomb – and it’s a good thing. Without the distractions, we’d be stuck in a storm of futuristic technology, a mire of Reagan-era politicizing and a tangle of product placements that further blur the lines between art and commerce today. It almost makes one pine for Bruce Waynian reticence.

It's like "Sophie's Choice," isn't it?

Here’s a fascinating, frustrating and ultimately inspiring piece about our ailing health care system. It focuses on the terrifying impact childhood obesity will have on the lives of youths age 6-19 (the number has tripled since 1980), and its direct link to premature Type Two diabetes. Which, by the way, has a direct link to skyrocketing medical bills that Americans can’t afford. Which further stifles health care. From the article:

And now for some slightly different—but no less controversial—health care news. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of obese children in the US has tripled since 1980. Yesterday, Kansas pediatrician Erin Moga told the Leavenworth Lamp, “Along with obesity come diabetes, hypertension and joint problems.” And Darrin Nordahl wrote in the Huffington Post that the prevalence of diabetes in America will double in the next two-and-a-half decades, and that “escalating health care costs today are symptomatic of our sick nation, one in which today’s children, for the first time in history, are expected to live sicker and die younger than their parents.”

Parent Earth aims to revolutionize community consumption and launch campaigns that will make available healthy, fresh, affordable food. The key, Betancourt believes, is teaching parents to be conscious consumers, so that they can lead their little ones by example.

There’s no quick fix here, but I wonder if a different take on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Teach Your Children Well” is a possibility:

And feed them on your dreams (read: don’t feed your kids trans-fats)

The one they picked, the one you’ll know by. (read: give them vegetables, stupid)

Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry (read: it’s your fault that the tots don’t know the difference between a tomato and a potato)

So just look at them and sigh (read: the sighing and wheezing are from your arduous walk up the stairs to tell the kids that dinner tonight will consist of steamed broccoli)

Mrs. Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson Unavailable for Comment. Former President is Struck Down by a Board of Education Vote in Austin.

When will Oliver Stone make 'TJ' the movie?

Austin, Mar. 18–President Thomas Jefferson was removed from office and killed by assassins. He died from an existential shot in the dark caused by a board vote that was fired at him while he was educating Texas children.

Theologian John Calvin was sworn in as Jefferson’s successor in the Texas curriculum minutes after the president’s death.

Mr. Calvin is 445 years old; Mr. Jefferson was 183.

Shortly before the assassination, Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar made a motion to change a standard enabling students to study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She proposed to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She added Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argued, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock pointed out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Dunbar’s amendment was approved by the Board. And President Jefferson was eliminated.

Disciples of Enlightenment cried “Oh no!” immediately after the president was struck.

Mr. Calvin made no statement.

The blow, witnesses say, seems to have come from the right and the rear of the United States democracy constitutional republic. Reports that shots rang out were later revealed to be gavels sounding off. The Texas Public School Book Depository in Dallas is not considered to be directly involved, and Elm Street remains open.

New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis recently wrote a piece qualifying Kathryn Bigelow’s much-deserved Oscar win for best director of a motion picture, the first won by a woman in the 82 years of the Academy Awards. Dargis went full-throttle on her subject matter (much the way Bigelow did).

“It was a long time coming,” she says.

As Ms. Bigelow suggested when she appeared on 60 Minutes on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which she was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (‘the desire to watch and identify with what you’re watching’). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that ‘the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.’

Right. But why make the dig about Steve Kroft’s absence? Had he been the interviewer, might the argument have been, “Lesley Stahl must have been busy…getting a mani/pedi”? That would have dovetailed pretty nicely with the feminist theory mentioned moments later.

Dargis also cites an article in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?” and written by Martha P. Nochimson. Says Dargis:

The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow and her ‘masterly’ [terror quotes Dargis's] technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured ’summary dismissal.’ The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, ‘reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.’

That is, I think, bullshit. Movies made by women are under no more obligation to reflect romantic strife and the spillover of emotions than movies made by men are to put audiences through an evening of gangsterdom and science fiction. There is no reason under this or any other sun why a paying movie crowd delineated by gender should force the industry to pander to itself.

Dargis has gone on record as believing that the “chick flick” (by which she means a movie helmed by a woman) is in trouble because it does not have the full support of its industry. Rather it is in danger of getting compartmentalized or shuttled off to the medium’s no-man’s land: the romantic comedy. Movies about women tend to fall into this trap, but movies by women are definitely a rarer breed. Dargis and Nochimson almost have a dialogue going, even if both happen to be talking within a room of one’s own (with audiences of many).

In the Times piece, Dargis asserts that Bigelow’s success was “primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce Strange Days. But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next two features, The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker. It wasn’t until she went off to the desert to shoot The Hurt Locker…that she found a movie that hit on every level.”

By the night of the Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker had grossed less than $13 million domestically, the lowest ever for a best picture Oscar winner. Box office success is a fairly significant level that Bigelow’s film has yet to reach, in spite of its hitting whatever other levels there may be when one conceives of a successful motion picture.

It is impossible to tell what Bigelow’s Oscar win will mean for her as a woman, if for no other reason than it’s a piece of metal foisted on her for crafting a product that earned the respect and accolades of those who watch movies as a profession and those who participate in film as members of a league. Her womanness does not make The Hurt Locker better any more than The Hurt Locker makes her a better woman. Does her landmark award win help pave the way for female filmmakers? Not at all. It opens a door. But whether or not a director (regardless of gender) wants to walk through that door and make a film of quality (regardless of its genre) is entirely up to him or her.

Rob Reiner directed When Harry Met Sally… and A Few Good Men, which are a dandy little rom-com and military courtroom drama, respectively; he also directed Rumor Has It…, which is a bad film on every level. Maybe movie studios should have their stable of directors play spin the bottle for all future projects. Talk about leveling the playing field.

Kathryn Bigelow's big and low moment

Movie watchers and scorekeepers: please stop qualifying Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar for best director. She’s the first woman to win the award, which is momentous, long overdue and profound. But let’s not give her the whole Rosie the Riveter treatment. Last night, backstage at the Kodak Theater, Bigelow put it best:

“I hope I’m the first of many [women],” she said. “I’d love to just think of myself as a filmmaker, and I long for the day when a modifier can be a moot point. But I’m ever grateful if I can inspire some young, intrepid, tenacious male or female filmmakers and have them feel that the impossible is possible.”

Bigelow’s victory got off to a bad start almost immediately upon winning her Academy Award. “The time has come,” presenter Barbra Streisand bellowed, looking proud (and ever so slightly pissed: an “I-paved-the-way-for-female-directors-and-I-still-haven’t-gotten-a-stinkin’-nomination” expression did wash over her face for a brief moment.).

Bigelow took to the stage, towered over her peers and colleagues both symbolically and physically (she’s statuesque like Tilda Swinton), finished her speech, and was led off the stage. This is all well and good. But hit the instant replay: It was a dispiritingly sexist moment rather than one intended to erase gender classification issues.

First some back story. Streisand’s presence as the best director Oscar’s presenter was a significant one. She is the legendarily overlooked director of “Yentl” (1983), which received five Academy Award nominations, but none for the major categories of best picture, actress or director (all of which her name was tied to). She’d won the Golden Globe for directing it only months earlier. And in 1991, she helmed “The Prince of Tides,” a ciritically acclaimed film that had a good showing at that year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations – save for one for Streisand as director, even on the (sigh) heels of her DGA nomination.

Jump to 2010, Oscar night, the award for best director. Streisand’s name is announced as presenter, and she walks to the microphone majestically, to waves of ovations. And then she stops. Center stage. So she can be escorted down the handful of steps, to her mark. And eveything just deflated.

Barbra Streisand is not royalty, at least not by the literal definition. We can at least agree on that. And she was wearing a pantsuit, which suggested that she probably wouldn’t have needed much help maneuvering one foot in front of the other. And she appeared in good health, fit, physically able enough, to make the roughly 30-foot trek on her own.

So why require a man’s assistance? It didn’t appear that she was in danger of stepping into a patch of mud. And it may be the turn of the century – but not the 20th century. Surely she could have made the incredible journey solo to, you know, bring the moment home a bit better.

And after Bigelow’s gracious speech, she exited stage left, accompanied by – it couldn’t have been, it just couldn’t – “I am Woman,” the kitschy, flamboyant Helen Reddy ode to female empowerment whose lyrics are an assortment  of airquotes and cliches so thick as to suggest parody. When Reddy won a Grammy for singing the hit single in 1972, she famously thanked God because, “She makes everything possible”. Fine. But that sentiment, nearly 30 years later, feels campy, corny and damagingly retrograde.

So Bigelow won the movie industry’s highest accolade for her managerial (sorry, her womanagerial) skills behind the camera. She made a movie about war, which is not a man’s subject. As she said during her speech last night, it affects all of us, and she dedicated her movie to all men and women who wear a uniform.

I think Kathryn Bigelow should helm next year’s Academy Awards show. But if the producers try welding a skirt to Oscar for next year’s telecast, you heard it here first.

Which one's the cardboard character?

You can bet your bottom dollar that the producers of “Up in the Air” were feeling down in the dumps after their movie’s Oscar hopes were deflated by the big blue bore and the demi war epic helmed by former couple James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, respectively. I, for one, am glad about this. Glad, because, while I liked Walter Kirn’s book very much, Jason Reitman’s buoyant movie adaptation is one of the ugliest depictions of pop-misanthropy since the misguided – and ever misunderstood – musical “Annie.”

George Clooney portrays professional business traveler and occasional corporate hammer-dropper Ryan Bingham with his usual head-nodding, pebble-voiced, glamorous elan. He’s immensely likable in his role as a disconnected anti-human resources agent. He picks up Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga, as another Armani-clad business shark) in a bar, they smolder like Bogart and Bacall, and we watch their pas de deux with stars in our eyes. But wait a moment. This juxtaposition can’t be for real, can it? Bingham and Goran plan a rendezvous by slapping their laptops on a table with Balanchinian timing and don’t bother to look at each other while they coordinate a layover lay. They drop credit cards before each other like dueling Blackjack dealers. But then, when the sun comes up, they enter back into the actual world of an ailing economy (which those credit cards are helping to stifle, by the way) and unemployment (which Bingham treats like a game of Whack A Mole). How sincere! How honest!

“To know me is to fly with me,” Bingham says in an early voice-over, which makes him sound like a commercial for American Airlines (which this movie essentially is – the product placement is so thick you could choke on it. Try and count the number of times you see or hear the words Hilton and Hertz). He spends most of his time up there with the birds, and “forty-three miserable days at home,” in Omaha. He lives in what is essentially a small hotel room with no furniture and a few tailored suits. Character development, ladies and gentlemen.

“Up in the Air” hates women almost as much as 2004’s “Sideways” does. Remember Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s jaunty romp through California’s wine country in which men are positioned as lovable sad-sacks or incorrigible womanizers, and women are classified as either stupid or harpies? (One male protagonist steals from his dotty mother and the other male protagonist cheats on his fiancee whenever he can. “Can you blame them?” the movie begs us. One main female character is unable to take responsibility for herself and the other main female character is an irrational, sexed-up loose cannon who casts her own – and her daughter’s – best interests to the wind for a little hanky-panky.) Similarly, Goran makes an excuse for her own grotesqueness of character: “I am the woman you don’t have to worry about. Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina.” If we’re meant to, by movie’s end, empathize with Bingham – or at very least, pity him – then Goran’s explained womanhood marks her as the less sympathetic character. 

Goran cheats on her family, and rather than direct our sympathies to them, “Up in the Air” plunges the camera in front of poor Ryan Bingham, furrowed brow and all. Poor guy.

Poor people (left): bad; rich people (right): good.

When “Annie” hit the Broadway stage in 1977, it was heralded by critics and remains an audience favorite, a feel-good show, if you will. Never mind that, above all else, the musical’s premise is simple: Rich people are benevolent and generous, poor people are greedy and cruel. Disagree? Read the synopsis and listen to the tuneful, but mean -spirited lyrics, then get back to me. It’s cause for sorrowful head shaking. “Up in the Air” also places wealthy people on a higher (yes) plane. When Bingham makes a pit stop to attend his modest sister’s modest wedding, he’s a salt-and-pepper prodigal son and brother. And he’s glossily idealized in two scenes featuring his sister’s fiance Jim. One takes place at a bar, where Jim inarticulately rhapsodizes about how exciting it would be to live Bingham’s life. Have, meet have-not: Try and understand one another, now. The more egregious example is on the day of the wedding. Jim’s got cold feet, you see, and when Bingham’s sister enlists her wise, elegantly appointed brother to smooth things over, we watch as Jim sits in a kindergarten classroom, on a chair built for a tot, trying to comprehend a children’s book. “Aren’t poor people stupid?” Reitman’s camera seems to ask us. Silver-voiced Bingham saves the day, abetted by Goran (who seems to have tagged along merely so that she can at one point break into a building with her credit card against a window lock. Aren’t rich people clever? Their tools can get them anywhere!).

And the running gag that forces Bingham to pose for pictures in front of a number of national landmarks – because his penniless sister and her dim fiance can’t afford a honeymoon and want cardboard cutouts of themselves superimposed against them instead – is the worst kind of insulting.

Then there’s Natalie (an adorable Anna Kendrick in an impossible role), Bingham’s perky colleague. She represents the same cold, exacting corporate world, only she’s the next generation of reverse headhunter (head lopper?). Everything he does in person, she does with a computer.

Natalie is whiny, gaspingly naive and still manages to hold our interests. Until the third act. That’s where “Up in the Air” falls apart for me. During one of their mass firings, Bingham and Natalie encounter a woman who states, calmly and with conviction, that she will commit suicide upon dismissal. And then, we learn by the movie’s end, she does.

Two things.

One: They may be anti-human resources agents, but they’re in the same business (they explain the severance package terms to the recently fired). Should an employee threaten the well-being of himself or another employee, a human resources professional would report that immediately to the appropriate authorities within the company or, potentially, outside (police or doctors).

Two: Again, the focus is shifted from the actual tragedy and victim to the reaction to the tragedy and the privileged protagonist reacting to it. The movie ignores the woman who’s killed herself in favor of giving a close-up to Natalie, who weeps about how it happened on her watch and how sorry she feels for herself. And Bingham, feeling badly not for the victim, but for his colleague, does the single most selfish thing he possibly could: Rather than writing a letter to the family of the recently deceased (whose death he must feel at least somewhat responsible for), he writes a recommendation on behalf of Natalie to her future employer.

As is his wont, Jason Reitman weaves facile yarns about unrealistically sassy, attractive protagonists, ankle-deep in a real social issue, and provides them with obnoxiously stylized dialogue that renders them unreliable and their situation unrelatable. “Up in the Air” feels selfishly made, as though entitlement was not merely something Reitman decided to explore, so much as glorify.

Like “Annie,” “Up in the Air” mellifluously skates along the surface of its deeper themes with bonhomie and good humor. And it outlines its characters with such broad strokes, they start to resemble the cardboard cutouts Bingham keeps holding up to the camera, in hopes of passing a false truth as the real mccoy. When people as awful as the ones depicted in this film hover gorgeously in suspended unemotion above the clouds, one wonders if at any point a little light might inform their altruistic nature, if the sun will in fact come out. As our little redheaded moppet dutifully peals…

…tomorrow.

The Academy Award nominations were announced this week, 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.

Many critics are crowing that “Avatar,” director James Cameron’s latest entertainment, is positioned to change the art of moviemaking. They must have forgotten about the recent “Star Wars” installments and “Jaws 3D.”

In other news, moviegoers have made “Avatar” the most financially successful movie of all time as of yesterday, which suggests they too may have forgotten about a few movies of the not too distant past, including “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest,” “The Matrix” and the aforementioned “Star Wars” digital cartoons.

But what’s most curious is the political response to Cameron’s epic. In spite of its critical boon and box office bounty, it’s getting little love from either the right or the left. Never mind that Vice President Joe Biden fumbled with the title and overall moviegoing experience on CNN (which leads me to believe that he hasn’t actually seen the film).

So how good is this movie, anyway, sans hype? For a movie that heralds nature, the creatures cavorting onscreen like video game characters (also called avatars, go fig.) have a waxy seamlessness that goes against anything natural. Everything onscreen looks like “Tron” if it were art-directed by Thomas Kinkade, the “painter of light.” It’s all very luminescent: Trees with willowy tendrils sway like flaccid glow sticks; their dispersed seedlings suggest a cross between a dandelion and a jellyfish; even freckles on the faces of the Na’vi are rendered with fluorescence as a primer.

Then there’s the strange breakdown of liberal and conservative beefs with the message:

An American corporation run by, it would appear, the military, aims to harvest the natural resources from a planet called Pandora. The mineral in demand is witlessly called “unobtanium,” and the corporation may as well be called Halliburton.

The antagonists in “Avatar” are essentially white people. Minorities first arrive as allies of the military. But once the worm turns – i.e., when the marines cause a September 11th-scale attack on the symbol of the natives’ society – they side with the fringe people and sabotage their mission’s directives.

The indigenous people on Pandora, the Na’vi, live in harmony with the environment and have strong faith. They’re a peaceful tribe whose enlightenment comes across a bit closer to naivte. They’re still a class-driven society, the women are subservient to the males, they rely on the power of prayer to rationalize crises. They’re depicted as retrograde, primitive, stupid.

It’s enough politically fuzzy claptrap to compel the removal of our collective 3-D specs and squint disapprovingly at the bright, busy rectangle teeming with blurry algorithms bouncing from their digitized trammels like monkeys struggling to escape their cage.

Liberals and conservatives can argue about why “Avatar” makes them boil all they want. Here’s something to consider, though: It’s the most flippant movie that white guilt built since “Crash,” and the technology used during production is at loggerheads with the film’s anti-technology, pro-nature message.

It may win Best Picture at the Oscars. For all the wrong reasons.

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”

According to about 80,000 respondents to a poll on Oprah.com, 96% said they sided with Conan O’Brien, and 94% said they thought Leno should not return to the host post. That was prior to the interview. Interestingly, that statistic was only underscored once the Q&A had concluded. Maybe it was because he said that O’Brien all but stole “Tonight” from him half a decade ago.

Oprah hinted at her friendship with Leno, but went to great lengths to express her impartiality over the course of the hourlong chat. Perhaps she even overcompensated. Her questions came across as pointed, pejorative, even flirtatious with controversy. She asked him point-blank if he believed he was stealing the “Tonight Show” away from O’Brien, and if it was a selfish move. Leno replied, “To me, retiring seemed like the selfish thing to do.”

“That’s the way this business works,” added Oprah. This is fascinating: Leno used the same explanation when he addressed NBC’s decision to move him back to his old gig on “The Jay Leno Show” last Monday. “That’s show business.”

It’s fascinating because Leno himself was essentially fired from the “Tonight Show” five years ago, and rather than going quietly into that good (late) night, he didn’t leave NBC (he alleges because network big wigs were reticent about letting him find succor at another network).

Oprah stuck to her guns. Why didn’t he just retire? Does he feel responsible? Did he put the kibosh O’Brien’s residency at the molted peacock?

“I always felt I was doing the right thing,” Leno said. “How can you do the right thing and have it go so wrong? Maybe I’m doing something wrong if this many people are angry and upset over a television show. I had a show. My show got canceled. Who wouldn’t take [the "Tonight Show" back]? … I think I’m a good guy. Am I not a good guy?”

Leno compared himself to a prize fighter who’d taken some hits and would come back swinging. Particularly when it came to the unsympathetic ribbing he got from his fraternity brothers of late night comedy over the last couple of weeks. “I’m really surprised that so many people are against you,” Oprah said. She spoke specifically about Leno’s rival (in so many ways) David Letterman referring to him as “Big Jaw” and entitled. “You responded with a joke about Dave’s wife. I think that was beneath you,” Oprah scolded.

“I’m like a boxer. I hit back,” he answered. Here’s the thing. Letterman’s comments, while personal, are aligned with Leno’s own description of his physical self – Leno even wrote a book whose title was merely transliterated by Letterman during monologues. But attacking a rival’s wife comes across as biting but toothless.

Leno also compared his entitled nature to marriage and the “Tonight Show” to paradise. “I look around and see a good looking woman and I think, ’she’s cute,’ but then I go back to my wife and say this is what I have. It’s paradise already.”

Not that declaring he’s got a wandering eye is a bad idea. In a 1999 Esquire article about George Clooney, a southern woman relays a run-in with Leno to writer John H. Richardson: “Ah don’t like him. Ah had glasses in my cleavage” – she demonstrates, hooking her glasses in her shirt with a revealing tug – “and he didn’t even look at me, he looked at my cleavage. He’s a pervert.”

But back to the boxer comments. This has been Leno’s go-to description for whom- or whatever he deems noble and righteous. After the attacks of 9/11, he referred to America as a “prizefighter who had been knocked down.” It was an illogical, poorly articulated simile then, and it’s a misguided, obnoxious one now. Either way, it’s inappropriate.

According to Leno, the hubbub was “a perfect storm of bad things happening: You have two hit shows…you move them both to another situation. What are the odds that both would do extremely poorly?”

Oprah asked if he had spoken with O’Brien about the doings that transpired. “Not yet, but maybe later,” Leno responded. Oprah’s face dropped: “Why not?”

Leno has gone on record stating that he assumed O’Brien would be satisfied with the initial late shift compromise that would have put both hosts in back-to-back shows starting at 11:35 p.m., and would have left O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” to air after midnight. “That’s the way this business is,” Oprah said.

Five years ago Leno agreed to hand over that job to O’Brien. It wasn’t personal, it was professional. If only someone had told him about double standards. “Being retired seems like the selfish thing to do,” he caviled, almost selflessly, hinting that the 170 people who work for him would have had to seek other work. “It’s a team effort. As long as I’m working, they’re working,” he said. He also giggled with a shit-eating grin, “I like being a highly paid employee!”

Didn’t Conan O’Brien have a team (other than “team Coco”) who are now out of work? Leno glibly deflected any such ramifications that came of his own refusal to leave the “Tonight Show” and NBC without a fight or a compromise. The implication was clear:

That’s show business.