The Blind Side was very unfairly maligned by many of my diehard arthouse brethren for being too "mass-market" and condescending to deserve inclusion on the list of Best Pictures of the year. Generally, these comments came from those completely averse to sports in any form: filmed, live-televised, or theoretically played during the course of history. Still others decried the demerits of the film due to its direct adherence to convention and the "undeserved" Best Actress win of Sandra Bullock. Almost all of these people refused to even watch the movie, but cast their judgment in stone.
I'm not a jock and never was, and I'm a lefty liberal progressive (with conservative tendencies in sensible areas). I enjoyed The Blind Side very much on the same terms I enjoyed John Lee Hancock's The Rookie. It's meat and potatoes instead of tofu and sprouts, and features people who'd be generally considered dyed-in-the-wool Republicans in roles other than outright villains. That doesn't describe me to a "T", but if you let the story and the metaphor it serves at the outset work rather than fight it, the movie is quite effective.
I've spent short periods of time with not quite as little to my name as Michael Oher does, but if those brief passages in life allowed a more affecting connection to the material for me, then so be it. It's difficult for The Generation of Plenty to perceive the reality of anyone homeless or without resources, since they've never willingly or unwillingly done without.
The extras aren't terribly plentiful, but the Michael Oher interview speaks a little to the NCAA allegations that become a turning point in the film. Bullock did an interview with Leigh Anne Tuohy that's split into a few micro-chunks. More substantive is the set of mini-interviews that director Hancock did with Michael Lewis, who wrote the book. My favorite extras were Acting Coaches: Behind The Blind Side and The Story of Big Quinton. The former gives some time to the really gregarious, hilarious coaches who appeared as themselves, and the latter is a moving look at the background of Quinton Aaron (who plays Oher). The additional scenes are the only extra also found on the DVD. Amazon is offering the Blu-ray at $22.99.