By Steven Zeitchik

It seems fitting that one of our final Risky Business blog posts (more on that in a second) is an item recounting the charms of/pleading in the name of Oscar for “Sugar,” Anna Boden’s and Ryan Fleck’s story of a young Dominican baseball prospect who arrives in the U.S. to find that all is not as he expected. The sharply-told drama debuted at Sundance two years ago, which was pretty much the same time we took the reins of this blog, and which gives the whole thing a nice circle-of-life, Elton John kind of feeling.

First, the movie. We hadn’t seen it since that January afternoon back in 2008, but watching an awards screener this week we were reminded of the picture’s many subtle charms. The way, for instance, that  Algenis Perez Soto’s Miguel “Sugar” Santos glides through the film with a mix of quiet confidence and utter guilelessness, like Pedro Martinez had somehow gotten crossed with Chauncey Gardner. Or how he does so in the service of a movie — which, if you haven’t seen it, offers heapings of fish-out-of-water drama and humor as young Miguel navigates his life in the minor leagues and Midwest — about a striver thrust into a system that seems to be aligned against him. More than anything else that’s come out in recent years, “Sugar” reflects how immigrants — and, maybe, given this country’s recessionary struggles, how many of us  — live now.

Good movies blare their relevance from the rooftops. The great ones don’t have to –  they just unassumingly tell their stories, leaving us to understand later just how significant it all was. (”Invictus,” the Clint Eastwood awards hopeful that’s just now being reviewed, seems to be aiming for the same thing, with moderately successful results.)

Social commentary is hardly Sugar’s only tricky balancing act. By setting itself up as a typical sports movie — starry-eyed rookie gets his big break — the film is deliberately provoking our expectations about underdog triumphs and happy endings, which makes its very non-sports-movie left turn in the third act that much more startling and ambitious. The filmmakers almost seem to be daring us to like a movie that doesn’t follow the usual pattern of catharsis… after pretending that that’s exactly where they were headed. The amazing thing is that they pull it off.

“Sugar” has had a strange release history. Some buzz was squandered after Sundance when a deal didn’t happen for more than two months. When it did, buyer Sony Pictures Classics bet on an opening that would coincide with the start of baseball season. That meant waiting nearly a full year, which in turn meant that even some media supporters had lost track of it and that swaths of adult filmgoers had continued to lose interest in sophisticated dramas.

Still, in a year when the original screenplay category is strikingly thin — “The Hurt Locker,” “Up” and possibly “A Serious Man” are the only candidates even close to a certainty — here comes “Sugar,” right there in the mix. We don’t know how voters will react to a work that so casually but forcefully undermines convention, or a film that doesn’t bludgeon you with emotion but subtly wins you over with its humanity, but we’re hoping the movie finally gets the moment under the lights it’s always deserved.

Speaking of lights, that brings us  back to the beginning, to the point that they’ll soon be turning off here for us (though the blog will of course continue under new stewardship). We’ll be heading across town to the Los Angeles Times, where we’ll have our own online presence. We hope you follow us there, even as you continue following this space.

It’s been a great two years at Risky, and we can only hope you feel even a small amount of the satisfaction reading this blog that we’ve felt in manning it. Sometimes the ending turns out differently than the original script had it, but that’s okay too. A little movie called “Sugar” showed us that.