When Sandra Bullock stepped on stage to accept the Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Blind Side, she was her perfectly calibrated, accessible self: the Miss Congeniality of the Hollywood beauty pageant.
Her long, dark hair sleek as an otter, her lips brightly red, she exuded the simple prettiness that endears her to female fans.
Not quite a girl next door, Ms. Bullock is more Everywoman -someone who has had to work hard for everything she has. She took a hiatus from the film-making business when she was unhappy with a lack of challenge in the roles she was offered. . She finds celebrity "meaningless and empty."
"It holds nothing for me, although it will hold a great table in a restaurant when you're at your peak," she once said.
She had her nose fixed - and it's still not perky. She had a goofy-fringe and bad-highlights period of hair history.
Best of all, "if she puts on weight, forget it. Her prettiness goes," observes Cooper Lawrence, a syndicated radio host in the United States and author of The Cult of Celebrity : What Our Fascination With the Stars Reveals About Us.
Gotta love our BFF Sandy!
It's Sandra Bullock's position as the avatar of average femininity that fuels the continuing tabloid frenzy about her marital woes in the wake of revelations that her motorcycle-enthusiast husband, Jesse James, cheated on her with Michelle "Bombshell" McGee, a Nazi-loving tattooed creature with a name that helps catapult the whole affair into a soap opera of archetypes.
There's the Good Woman, her Bad-Boy Husband and his Low-Rent Lovers (four at latest count, and at least one with saggy stockings and a cheap-looking cone bra).
If there ever was a celebrity romance/breakup story that reveals the purpose of tabloid culture, this is it. (Though maybe it's not quite as enduring as the ongoing Jennifer Aniston-Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie triangle.)
We're fascinated because they're proxies for our broken romantic dreams. We don't really care about them as individuals. And we wouldn't bother with them if their troubles were over business deals or bad real-estate transactions. We pay attention because they play out our worst nightmares.
The human heart is one complicated universal muscle, and with celebrities we can theorize endlessly over the virtual garden fence about why the love didn't last, who was to blame, and whether the wronged woman will come out of seclusion soon to put a brave face on her devastating humiliation.
"I don't think there's a woman out there who hasn't had a romantic situation like Sandra Bullock has had," comments Ms. Lawrence. "She does everything right, but things don't work out for her."
Ms. Bullock remained single until 2005, just before she turned 41, when she wed Mr. James. There had been boyfriends in her past, and all of them presented romantic complications - Matthew McConaughey (the eternal bachelor) and Ryan Gosling (a little too young for her). There was even an engagement to Tate Donovan, a little-known actor with whom she'd starred in a forgettable romcom.
"I don't think it was that she was picky," Ms. Lawrence says. "The perception was that men wouldn't fall in love with her. She couldn't find the right guy."
Her marriage to Mr. James, five years her junior, cemented her image as America's Sweetheart. She would reform him. His exes included a porn star, Janine Lindemulder: Ms. Bullock was his salvation. She was playing out a cliché script that never loses its punch.
"She pushes me to be a better person," Mr. James told People magazine in 2006.
"No one knows what someone is like based on appearance," Ms. Bullock was quoted as saying about their unlikely pairing.
"She never had the typical romance," comments Bonnie Fuller, editor-in-chief of hollywoodlife.com. "It was as though she was seeing people for who they truly were. And with Jesse, people didn't like him. Her friends didn't like him. But they thought, 'If Sandra likes him, then he must be okay.' Everything about her was admirable. She was like the characters she played in films."
Ms. Bullock was the ideal stepmom to Mr. James's three children (never an easy task). She was actively involved in the custody battle for the youngest when Ms. Lindemulder was imprisoned for tax evasion. She even adopts handicapped canines from a local shelter.
She fawned over her monkey-suited bad boy at all the awards shows, gushing about her love for him, how hot he was, how much she wanted him, as the cameras panned to his mug, smiling in his goatee. We believed in their love.
So is it simply a schadenfreude thrill we get by witnessing her heartbreak, by refusing to let the story go ? Better her than us? A cautionary tale? Tsk, tsk, Sandy: Bad boys will always be bad?
Sure - at least partly. But as weeks go by, and the scandal remains on the covers of the tabloids, darker theories are emerging.
Ms. Bullock, who has a squeaky-clean, sex-tapeless Hollywood image, is reportedly reluctant to divorce Mr. James. Some have speculated that she is worried about his erratic behaviour. He has publicly (as well as through his attorney) pleaded for her forgiveness; she has remained silent.
"She doesn't want to send him over the edge," one anonymous "friend" was quoted as saying, shoring up the übermaternal rescuer-of-lost-souls image.
More troubling is the notion that perhaps Ms. Bullock is fearful that if she divorces him, he will sell stories that could ruin her image. Could it be that America's Sweetheart - an image she has certainly done her best to uphold - has some marital secrets that could make her Miss Nasty, not Miss Congeniality?
"Look, maybe you don't know that your hubby is having sex with some floozy when he goes to his office, but don't tell me you don't know that he has a Nazi room full of stuff," opines Ms. Lawrence, who worked in Hollywood as an assistant to celebrities before becoming an author.
"She must have known," she says of Mr. James's rumoured interest in neo-Nazism.
Stay tuned. We are all not what we seem.