Much as I’d love to be complete in my moviegoing, feasting my eyes on each and every significant offering to get splashed up on screens, a variety of reasons necessitate a more selective approach. For a long time, I used the Academy Awards as a major guide as to what I should carve out time for. I spent months seeking out the movies that seemed likely to factor into the various races, and, once the actual nominations arrived, the duly anointed contenders became required viewing. I’ve let that mandate waver somewhat in recent years, bypassing certain films that didn’t strike me as especially promising. But last year, perhaps fueled in part by the expansion to ten films in the Best Picture category, I felt less compelled than ever before to march to the Academy’s tune. As a result, for the first time since I started working on the film review radio show almost twenty years earlier, I watched the recipients for both of the lead acting awards pick up their trophies without any firsthand knowledge of the performances that earned the accolades. It’s not that I was surprised by the winners, either. Victories for both Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges were nearly foregone conclusions once the official nominations were announced. I just plainly didn’t want to see their respective films. I knew I’d get to them sometime, but I didn’t feel the need to meet the awards night deadline.

As fate would have it, both The Blind Side and Crazy Heart landed on our household DVR at around the same time, so I decided to make up for my own Oscar-devotee blind side by watching them together one night.

We started with The Blind Side (John Lee Hancock, 2009), the football drama which earned Bullock her first significant awards season attention, and a handful of other prizes on her way to the Best Actress Oscar win. Based on a true story and taken, at least somewhat, from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, the film casts Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a Memphis interior designer and wife of a wealthy Taco Bell magnate. She’s already somewhat notorious among her friends for having a soft spot for causes when she convinces her family to take in a large African-American high schooler who she spies walking along the road in freezing weather. The family gives the boy some purpose and direction, which eventually culminates in his stardom as a football player, coveted by a bevy of college programs.

The movie is, to put it kindly, Hollywood hokum. It may be accurate, but much of it feels phony, constructed to yield the maximum number of tears from well-to-do ticket buyers. It doesn’t help that it follows the same unfortunate white savior storyline that’s sunk many well–meaning films before it. It actually starts fairly well, but frays into shameful hogwash as it goes along, especially as it introduces more and more elements that feel like results of the most officious screenplay workshop, like the precious youngster who increasingly takes center stage.

To her credit, Bullock is actually quite good. It’s arguably one of her best performances since she stormed into prominence with Speed and When You Were Sleeping, two acting efforts that were were extremely strong, though never likely to garner serious praise because they were nestled in ostensibly lightweight films. It may seem like faint praise, but Bullock is always convincingly, decisively a different person from the onscreen persona that she’s worn in with rigor over the course of the past fifteen years. It would be easy for her to lean on her bright persona to draw sympathy for her character. Instead, she plays Leigh Anne with a forthright attitude and a corresponding abrasive that suits the character. It’s fearless in its own way, and one of the main regrets of the film is that she’s routinely working against actors seemingly incapable of matching her skill and conviction. There may have been a few extra ticket buyers who showed up in week one because country singer Tim McGraw was tapped to play her husband, but there are plenty of times in the film in which the stunt casting serves Bullock poorly. An actor who might have challenged her (or at least matched her) could have elevated the performance further. It’s fine work on her part, but it also seems a missed opportunity, an example of an actress who’s notably better than her material.

I’ll say this for The Blind Side, it’s surprisingly better than Crazy Heart (Scott Cooper, 2009). For all its problems, at least The Blind Side is never brutally boring. To a degree, Bridges won his Oscar because it was the fifth nomination in a sterling career that had been previously unrewarded by the Academy. Bridges plays a burned out country singer who performs under the name Bad Black, forecasting his own dead end lifestyle with the moniker that gets commemorated in ever-dimming lights. He’s bitter about his lack of fiscal success and happy to dive deep into liquor bottles to soothe the pain, a practice that’s only mildly diverted by his unlikely romance with a lovely young reporter played by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

It’s a familiar story made more problematic by its wan execution. There’s almost a complete absence of any sort of visual panache, and a corresponding disinterest in pushing the story into interesting, novel directions. Anyone with a few movies under their belt could probably map out the path of the story after watching the first few scenes. Bridges is good in the role–he’s almost always good, often great–but it’s a dramatic dead end, a pallid exercise in pending redemption. Gyllenhaal received her own Oscar nomination, and she plays individual scenes with vigor. But her character is an indecisive wreck, changing attitudes to suit the needs of the screenplay, sometimes minute to minute.

Despite all this grousing, I have no animosity over either of the Oscar wins, which is probably attributable to my increasingly lax attitude towards Hollywood’s greatest honor. Bridges is absolutely one of the actors who deserves to have his name engraved on the base of one of those trophies, no matter what film is carved below it. And Bullock is a true rarity: a resolutely likable performer that it’s almost possible to root against. While it’s admittedly not the criteria that should determine the outcome of a contest based on artistic merit, the graciousness and humility she displayed throughout the seemingly endless parade of awards show honorifics lofted her way made every win feel sweetly wondrous, like some constantly rejuvenated triumph of the underdog. It was like watching a loved one be venerated in front of a beaming crowd that finally saw her in a way that matched your own familial pride. There might be sounder rationale for bestowing the career-changing Oscar upon someone, but in my many years of watching, studying and sometimes obsessing over the awards, I’ve seen them handed out under far shakier reasoning. I can probably think of at least a half dozen performances that qualified for the Best Actress category that were superior to Bullock’s last year, but like the Oscar attendees who gave her a standing ovation upon her victory, I would have been happy to cheer for her success.