Sandra Bullock gets on Oscars’ right side

Sandra Bullock, America’s sweetheart of popular movies, has suddenly become Oscar’s sweetheart too.

One of Hollywood’s most beloved comic actresses, Bullock walked off with the Academy Award for playing true-life Southern power mom Leigh Anne Tuohy in the unexpected blockbuster “The Blind Side.” Based on the nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis, and written and directed by John Lee Hancock, the film told the story of how Tuohy and her family adopted and nurtured homeless black teenager Michael Oher, who became a star Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman.

“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” asked Bullock, who’s been characteristically self-deprecating throughout the entire award season -- so much so that a mere 24 hours before the Oscars, Bullock gleefully showed up to collect the “Razzie” awarded her for the worst performance of the year, for “All About Steve.”

Bullock has, in fact, run one of the most gracious anti-campaign Oscar campaigns in recent memory -- even as she racked up a slew of awards -- pretending to have a rivalry with Meryl Streep. At the Critics Choice Movie Awards, Bullock placed a jokey lip lock on the much-lauded Streep. From the Oscar night podium, Bullock gave love and tribute to her fellow actress nominees, noting, “Meryl, you know what I think of you. You’re such a good kisser.”

Taking a theme from the film, which has grossed $250 million in the U.S., Bullock also saluted “the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from,” and heralded her own mother, a German opera singer, who curbed her daughter’s wildness (“not letting me ride in cars with boys until I was 18”) and made her practice religiously her piano and ballet (“She said to be an artist, you have to practice every day”).

Her mother also apparently instilled in her daughter, now one of the biggest movie stars in the world, a rare instinct for humility, always “reminding her daughters,” noted Bullock, tamping down her obvious emotions, “that there’s no race, no religion, no class system, no color, nothing, no sexual orientation that makes us better than anyone else.

“We are all deserving of love.”

rachel.abramowitz @latimes.com