Sandra Bullock may win an Oscar for her role in the movie “The Blind Side”.

Joel Mathis, a writer for the Philadelphia Weekly, hopes she doesn’t. Said he on his blog last November, “There’s no subtlety here [in the movie]. Just a hammer to the face. Let’s be clear: The Blind Side book [upon which the movie is based] isn’t just about Michael Oher [the young man now playing pro football for the Baltimore Ravens]. It’s also about the Tuohys, the white family that took him in. But it is not about Sandra Bullock. That is, however, what ‘The Blind Side’ movie is apparently about. And I cannot take the idea of this marvelous book being reduced to a Michelle Pfeiffer ‘Dangerous Minds’ white-woman-saves-the-black-kid story, because it’s real life. And the real story is more complicated than that.”

That’s the difficulty with trying to compress a 304-page book into a 2-hour movie, the screenwriter has to simplify the story.

Mathis likes Michael Lewis’ book, considers it one of the better nonfiction books of the last few years.

If you haven’t read The Blind Side, here’s Mathis’ summary: “It tells the story of Michael Oher, an all-but-orphaned young man from the wrong side of the tracks in Memphis who was accepted into a private Christian school, adopted by a wealthy white family and set on the path to success. And oh yeah, his redemption roughly coincided with his emergence as a likely future NFL prospect.

“It’s a fascinating tale that implicitly raises questions about race, class, privilege and whether Oher – barely literate – would’ve been able to graduate from high school, let alone attend college, if he hadn’t had an army of people who became invested (in multiple meanings of that term) in his success. You spend the book rooting for Oher, even as a growing sense of unease sets in that maybe he’s being used, that he’d still be languishing somewhere in West Memphis if not for the accident of his genetic gifts. It’s a complex and sometimes subtle story, inspirational but not cheaply so, thanks to the issues it raises.”

So if you have not yet seen the movie, maybe you should skip it and instead read the book. It came out in September 2006 from W.W. Norton.

A side note. Blind Side author Michael Lewis once worked for Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Out of that experience, he wrote the 1989 bestseller Liar’s Poker. Lewis has written six books since, including Moneyball, his investigation into the economics of professional sports.

Tomorrow: Little Golden Books, remember those?