The Half-Blind Side

I was happy to see that Sandra Bullock won the best-actress Oscar Sunday night for her role in The Blind Side, but I think one the important issues that has been generally missed is that the movie should really been called The Half-blind Side.

The essence of the more-or-less-true story in the movie was that the Tuohy's (a wealthy Memphis family) rescued a poor struggling black kid from crushing poverty and helped him straighten out his life and become an NFL star. One point of conflict in the movie was that NCAA wanted to penalize Old Miss, the Tuohy's alma mater, for the Tuohy's improper roll in recruiting Michael Oher. In the movie the charges were sort of ridiculed as ridiculous in the light of the Tuohy's Christian charity.

In reality, Michael Oher was an outstanding football prospect when the Tuohys adopted him ("Stevie Wonder could have seen he was a future NFLer.") and the NCAA investigation was much more justified than the movie portrayed it. Oher has distanced himself from the movie, saying last fall that he hadn't even seen it, and commentators are even today ignoring his athletic accomplishments before the Tuohys took him into their family.

I don't know that this diminishes what the Tuohys did at all, but "the rest of the story" does give The Blind Side sort of a Paul Harvey twist.