Sandra Bullock doesn't remember winning her Oscar: 'I was hiding Lou'
The most famous night of Sandra Bullock's career is, by her own account, a blank. In a Vogue video alongside Nicole Kidman, written up by Entertainment Weekly last Wednesday, September 2, she was asked about the 2010 ceremony, the night The Blind Side made her Best Actress. Her answer: "I don't remember that night at all. I was hiding Lou."
Lou is Louis, the son she was in the process of adopting and had not yet announced. "He was a newborn. And I'd only had like 2 hours of sleep, and he had acid reflux. Don't remember a thing." The one moment she can recall is a flub while presenting the cinematography award: "I messed up. I presented to someone... don't know who it was. Couldn't read the copy." Then the night ends the way every parent's night ends. "I don't remember anything of that night, except for coming home for the feeding, and I couldn't get out of the dress." And after that: "Lying in the chair with Lou." Her summary of the whole evening: "Oscar came home and met Louie."
It is a lovely story, and it is doing something sneaky. It turns the win into a footnote to the adoption, which is exactly how a lot of fans already felt about it.
Was it ever her best performance?
No. The Blind Side is a good Bullock performance in a film built to flatter it. Leigh Anne Tuohy is a woman who walks into every room already right, and Bullock plays that certainty with real snap, but the role never asks her to be wrong, scared or funny in the way her best work does. The Oscar reads, in hindsight, as a reward for fifteen years of carrying films nobody else could have carried. That is a fine reason to give someone a statue. It does not make The Blind Side the performance.
The performance is Gravity. For most of its running time she is the only face on screen, sealed in a suit, talking to nobody, and she makes ninety minutes of breathing and panic into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Every skill she built in the nineties, the comic timing, the physical ease, the way she lets you watch her think, is stripped of a scene partner and still holds. That is the hardest thing an actor can be asked to do, and she did it four years after the night she cannot remember.
Below it, the order gets more fun to argue about. Speed is the movie that made her, and Annie is still the best example of the Bullock trick: an ordinary person who becomes the most capable one on the bus without ever seeming to try. Miss Congeniality is her purest comedy, and the one where you can see her enjoying her own body as a joke. The Proposal is the more polished rom-com, but it belongs to the pair rather than to her alone.
And then there is Two Weeks Notice, which she brought up herself. Asked in the same interview about sequels, she said: "They're hard to make and you want to make them with people you have great chemistry with. I'd like to work with Hugh Grant again. He's so brilliant. We've done a film together. Maybe a sequel." Hugh Grant turns 66 on Wednesday, September 9. If you want a birthday rewatch that doubles as a petition, that is the one.
What to do with this
Start with Gravity if you have only seen the Bullock of the rom-coms; it will change how you read the rest of her. Then go back to The Blind Side and watch it as a film she was sleepwalking through in real life, which makes the steadiness of the performance more impressive. If you want the version of her that is actually laughing, Miss Congeniality on a weeknight is the right call.
And for this week: she and Kidman are back together as the Owens sisters in Practical Magic 2, which opens Friday, September 11. That reunion is the reason the two of them were sitting in front of a Vogue camera at all. The Oscar story just turned out to be the better headline.
