My wife's favorite actress is Sandra Bullock, and she has a ton of her movies in our collection. I've seen plenty of Bullock's work over the years, liked some to most of it, but had never seen her Oscar winning turn until last night. While she certainly deserved accolades for her performance, for me the best acting done in a field of great acting was by Quinton Aaron.
Aaron plays Michael Oher, a hulking young man from the wrong side of the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee who is taken in by the Tuohy family, led by Bullock and Tim McGraw. Oher gets into a private school where his two new siblings go, being groomed to become a football player. His struggles with the new environment are predictable, but writer/director John Lee Hancock confidently weaves his cast through some nicely done scenes. Aaron's performance is fantastic. While physically imposing, his take on Oher is not childlike or naive. On the other hand, he is not dangerous, with the viewer waiting for him to lose his mind and go nuts from the overwhelming changes in his life. Another stand-out here is Irone Singleton as the grinning drug dealer Alton. He IS menacing and every second of his screen time had me on edge. Both Aaron and Singleton should have received Oscar nominations as well. Reading a bit online, I guess the real life Oher wasn't impressed with the film's depiction of his behavior and intelligence (he did know how to play football already, and is far from the Forrest Gump-like portrayal). There was one infamous slam against George W. Bush here (this was made back when everything was Bush's fault- even a long wait in a line at a government office), but Hancock did show Bullock to be a Southern Christian white woman in a positive light while still addressing racism from both sides of Oher's life.
Also, this is not a football movie per se. It's a nice and extremely well-acted drama about a football player, but there aren't endless scenes of staged plays and the finale doesn't involve a "big game" and last minute touchdown. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell shows up in some stock footage with the real Oher during the NFL draft, and I realized this was the most football I had seen in over a year, ever since the anthem kneelers drove me away.
