What Happens in the Mirror Universe Where Sandra Bullock Lost the 2009 Oscar?

https://www.vulture.com/amp/2020/01/welcome-to-the-mirror-universe-where-sandra-bullock-lost-the-oscar.html

The Academy Awards are many things: They’re a diversion, they’re a business; they’re an occasion to be dazzled by our most photogenic citizens, they’re an open-mic night for you and your friends to roast Ansel Elgort; they’re a reflection of what’s good and bad about the film industry. But they’re also a history. An imperfect history, to be sure, but there are few better, more accessible ways of tracking Hollywood through the years than by perusing the annual Oscar nominees and winners. And what’s even better than history? That’s right, you Tarantino stans: historical fiction.

The Oscars lend themselves well to speculation and alternate-timeline fantasies, mostly because what happens one year often depends on what happened the year before it — or several years ago, in fact. Would the drumbeat behind Brad Pitt and Laura Dern’s 2020 Oscar nominations be so loud if they’d been more recently recognized by the Academy? Does Renée Zellweger’s potential second Oscar win seem that much sweeter because her first was in the Supporting category? These Oscar narratives are like carefully constructed Jenga towers: When one brick gets pulled out, will the others fall? What if “X” had won the Oscar that year instead of “Y”? What else would have gone differently as a result?

The example I like to use to explain this phenomenon goes as follows: Say Al Pacino won Best Actor in 1974 for The Godfather: Part II instead of the sentimental career nod for Art Carney in Harry and Tonto. That means that in 1992, the narrative isn’t “Pacino’s finally gonna win one” for Scent of a Woman, and so Denzel Washington is more likely to win Best Actor for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Which means that Washington maybe doesn’t win in 2001 for Training Day, and instead Russell Crowe wins back-to-back Best Actor trophies for Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind.

Which brings me to Sandra Bullock. We’re coming up on ten years since America’s erstwhile rom-com queen finally got the industry respect she’d long deserved … in a movie of dubious quality. John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side is a well-meaning and deeply watchable movie that leans on the most tired of white-savior clichés. In this case, it’s the based-on-a-true-story tale of a frosty-haired, take-charge southern lady who brings a black teenager into her home, teaches him how to play football, and sets him on a path to NFL stardom and paychecks. The movie never met a cliché it didn’t like. But in addition to all its shortcomings, it was a leading-actress turn for the ages, with Bullock employing every ounce of her charisma to make the movie work. And to Oscar voters, that’s often just as good as capital-A Acting. So despite stiff competition from Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) and Meryl Streep (who won raves for embodying Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s final film, Julie & Julia), Bullock won the Oscar for Best Actress and gave the following speech (in which she unfortunately speaks rather highly of her soon-to-be-revealed-as-a-dirtbag husband while his cheating eyes filled with tears in the front row):
https://youtu.be/-hTTwSQPmMo

In the decade since her win, Bullock’s name is the one that tends to come up most often during discussions of Oscar triumphs that weren’t fully “deserved.” Whatever that means. As somebody who’s been following the awards for a long time, I say you can do far worse than recognizing an actress for a lifetime of star power, especially one who elevated middling pap into a massive hit. But we’re going to indulge the Sandy Skeptics today, because playing the What-If game with Bullock’s Oscar win takes us to some cool places.