Two Oscar sides of race

What does it mean that a virtually all-black movie made the final cut of 10 for the best picture Oscar this year and would surely have made the traditional cut of five? “Precious’’ has no white stars. Its nominated director and screenwriter are black, as is the author of its source material (in case you haven’t heard, it’s “based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire’’).

The movie tells the story of an overweight, illiterate teenager, pregnant with her second child (both of which are her missing father’s). It’s grim and, up to a point, sad. It is also an off-kilter melodrama and a moving tale of unmoored, undereducated girls holding on to each other, lest they drift into ignorance or drown. Does its embrace by the overwhelmingly white Academy (the movie has 6 nominations) mean that “Precious’’ was made for white people?

The movie’s most vociferous detractors are black, and a few of them have complained that it proffers the sort of victimization and monstrosity that comforts white audiences watching black people. Last month, the novelist and poet Ishmael Reed wrote on the op-ed page of The New York Times that, watching “Precious,’’ he felt under psychological assault. Setting aside that the assault is intentional, wouldn’t a white audience feel similarly attacked?

Reed goes on to lament the movie’s being used to draw untrue, unflatteringly dire conclusions about black families and jabs at the white film critics quoted on the “Precious’’ website. “It’s no surprise either that [they] maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.’’ What does it mean for a black critic, and for black moviegoers for that matter, to love this movie as much the Academy?

More important: When does a movie with black characters stop being about the entire black experience and start being about individual black people living their own lives. Can a movie do that? Ever? “Precious’’ has blown the mind of black America. It’s racist. It’s nasty. It’s brilliant. It’s triumphant. It’s insane. I see where everybody’s coming from. Some people are considering the film from their grad-school library carrels. Others are doing so from the broken-down elevator in their housing project. Where you stand on this movie depends largely upon where you’ve stood.

If you’ve been poor, abused, raped, undereducated, ignored, and led to believe that your dark brown skin disqualifies you for the cover of Vogue, then “Precious’’ is probably speaking to you. This is not to say that a failure to fall into any of those categories means the movie isn’t also speaking to you. But the great, exhilarating shock of the film is that it’s one of the few about black characters, especially a black woman, that feels like the story of one life as opposed to all lives.

For all the resonance of her various woes, Precious fails to meet the one-size-fits-all criterion of everywomanhood. If anything, she’s severely individual. She is, in fact, surrounded by other severely individual brown-skinned girls whose lives are hard.

I don’t tolerate the idea that this movie is defeatist. The great Belgium filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who traffic in bleak, sometimes unhappily ended tales of the underclass, are praised for their realism and never scolded for defeatism. As in life, so much of the world’s great cinema does not end well. The last shot of “Precious’’ electrified me, in part, because its optimism was hard. If her choice isn’t for the best, it’s inarguably for the better. In fact, I can’t say it’s all going to work out for her and her two children (this is Harlem in the late 1980s), but she’s going to fight to make it work.

I should say at this point that this isn’t the annoying part about being a black moviegoer. “Precious’’ is competing for best picture with “The Blind Side,’’ an astonishing freak occurrence. For years, no stories about big, black poorly parented teenagers, and then two in one month! Someone wanted to know why I was so “easy’’ on “The Blind Side,’’ which has Sandra Bullock rescuing Quinton Aaron from homelessness and worse by giving him a room in her house. Seriously: Guess who’s coming to dinner - and breakfast and church. It wasn’t that I was easy on the movie so much as the movie was easy on me. Bullock is very good in her way, and I liked how the movie presents the white Memphis family as a spunky unit. It also knows it’s wading into white-guilt territory; but Bullock’s character, Leigh Anne Tuohy, doesn’t entirely deny the charge. The smile that spreads across her face suggests white satisfaction.

The annoying part is that the Aaron character, Michael Oher, who now plays for the Baltimore Ravens, is presented not simply as a charity case. He’s welcomed into Tuohy’s home with the alacrity that a new puppy would be. Michael seems almost railroaded into football because none of the white people around him have the imagination to come up with a more original way to steer him forward. In Michael Lewis’s book, on which this movie is based, Oher has more agency in the path he takes. He doesn’t seem to want to offend his white benefactors.

This Michael is a black person only a white audience could love. Precious has a much more complete personality; she pushes back. She also possesses the vibrant inner life Michael lacks. “The Blind Side,’’ which John Lee Hancock wrote and directed, doesn’t have the filmmaking to bring Michael alive in the same way “Precious’’ does. But risk-averse moviemaking is hardly an excuse for the lack of a rich, innately human central character.

Oher is real but here seems like a figment. Precious is fictional but inarguably real. Asserting that women like Precious and her vividly abusive mother Mary exist is beside the point. The movie reflects the real world, but its story and images exist on their own refracting terms - real, yes, but surreal, too.

Reed says that he and an acquaintance felt that during “Precious,’’ they were under “psychological assault,’’ which is true. They were. But it was one teenager’s psychology not an entire race’s. That assault is one we inflict upon ourselves.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.