Happy Birthday Sandra Bullock, I guess...
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:00PM Paolo here.
Back in 2009 I stumbled into what looked like Bullock's CAA page, and seeing a certain factoid, I posted this question on my Facebook. "What do Stanley Kubrick and Sandra Bullock have in common?" "Well neither of them have an Oscar," a friend of mine said. He spoke too soon. [Correction: Kubrick has an Oscar but not for directing. Shake fist]
Then it was time to watch the live feed of the Oscars on campus. The fedora-wearing cinema studies students were passing around this hipster German beer and I took a sip and put it down. I swore that if Bullock won the Oscar, I'd throw my beer at the screen - I didn't, no one should. The sound of angry young men and some women collectively screaming against her victory is one of the ten greatest experiences I've ever had in a movie theatre. How the powers that be hustled such a seemingly mediocre film into a Best Picture nod and a Best Actress win was like watching steel beams bend by themselves.
Anyway, to commemorate Bullock's birthday, I watched neither the movies that I remember her being good at (A Time to Kill, Crash) nor the ones I saw in high school nor college that did not age well (28 Days) or even the fun ones (Practical Magic). Instead I saw John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side, the movie that won her the said Oscar and made her, on paper, better than Kubrick. To be honest, I had two tall glasses of beer, ruining some brain cells and I was afraid that this film would do more damage.
