'Blind Side' actor Quinton Aaron asks critics to leave Sandra Bullock alone
Quinton Aaron was not happy about individuals calling for his co-star Sandra Bullock's Academy Award to be rescinded, now that drama is being unearthed in the press about the family that inspired the movie 'The Blind Side.'
Liberal columnists attacked the 2009 film "The Blind Side" as a "White savior" tale that looks "even more fake than before," after former NFL player Michael Oher came out with bombshell claims against the Tuohy family.
Oher's allegations dominated headlines this week, after he claimed the Tuohys, who took him in as a youth, never legally adopted him and tricked him into a conservatorship from which they solely benefited.
The Tuohy family has denied these allegations. An attorney representing the Tuohys claimed Oher threatened to "plant" a negative story in the press about the Tennessee family unless they paid him $15 million.
However, liberal columnists were quick to seize on the controversy and attack the uplfiting tale behind "The Blind Side" for making the Tuohy family look like "White saviors."
Michael Oher, center, stands with Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy during senior ceremonies prior to a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi, on Nov. 28, 2008. (Matthew Sharpe/Getty Images)
Robyn Autry, a professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University, wrote off the film in a MSNBC column as "typical Hollywood White savior nonsense, that unsurprisingly made hundreds of millions of dollars."
The sociologist complained the film gave a "dishonest, condescending and emotionally manipulative" portrayal of race relations but was successful due to the White public craving "feel-good stories that portray them as heroes."
Autry also bashed the depiction of the mother-son relationship between Leigh Anne Tuohy's character and Oher's character as a "twisted version of ‘Beauty and the Beast.'"
"It excites a White imagination that longs for contact with the Black other and simultaneously fears that contact," the sociology professor wrote.
"The Blind Side"actor Quinton Aaron holds a special place in his heart for co-star Sandra Bullock, and has been disheartened by comments that the actress should lose her Academy Award for the film given the discourse between the real-life Tuohy and Oher families. (Kevin Mazur/VF11/WireImage/Getty Images)
The sociologist also criticized the film for how warmly the Tuohys treated Oher, calling this kind of "racial harmony" a "fantasy."
"The White person is the hero, without whom the Black characters, we’re left to believe, would never have been anything. The Tuohys are portrayed in a similar manner. And movie audiences would rather believe such a dream than engage in the difficult work of fighting for the kind of structural social change that would benefit everyone, even those a heroic White person never encounters," she wrote.
Variety columnist Owen Gleiberman also argued that Oher's claims opened the 2009 film up to scrutiny.
"The fakery, if you seriously watch 'The Blind Side,' is right up onscreen," he argued.
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The legal fight between the two parties "blows a rather sizable hole in the fairy-tale portrait" depicted in the movie, Gleiberman argued. The columnist dismissed the film as a "concocted" and "manipulative" tale that doesn't show the full story.
"In the current legal/financial/familial skirmish, each side is accusing the other one of manipulation. But in light of that, it’s worth noting what a manipulative movie ‘The Blind Side’ is. It’s the kind of pious, sweet-tea liberal tearjerker that has largely gone out of style (at least on the big screen), and that’s because what’s transparent is everything the movie isn’t showing," the critic wrote.
Despite his troubled past, filmmakers made Oher out to be "a Teddy-bear simpleton, with little to no psychology," Gleiberman claimed.
"[T]hat’s the lie of 'The Blind Side,'" he argued. "It’s what allows his character to basically be used by the Tuohys to feel good about themselves."
Fox News' Paulina Dedaj contributed to this report.
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