LOS ANGELES— If Precious ends up winning any Oscars this Sunday, its Cinderella story of success will be complete. But the fairy tale almost certainly wouldn't have come this far had it not been for its household-name executive producers, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry.

That Oprah and Tyler Perry joined forces behind Precious is surprising on the surface—two black media forces with great commercial success in rather different demographics come together, and they come together over a film that's about the hardest in Hollywood to market: a black independent drama, with an overweight, unknown actress in the lead to boot. But the story behind the partnership illuminates much.

Perry went scouting at Sundance for a film his new production company could get behind, something entirely removed from his Madea franchise. He quickly found it in Precious, a movie that is as intimate, sobering and challenging as Madea is geared toward broad-stroke entertainment. Precious was also deeply personal for Perry, an evocation of the physical and sexual abuse he'd suffered as a child. It was this personal connection that convinced Perry to support Precious, and also convinced him that Oprah, another rich and famous survivor of a troubled past, should do the same. Thus a cause, and a team, was born.

Still, they're a bit of an odd couple. Perry's films are lowest-common-denominator verging on propagandistic; Oprah's film endeavors, though geared to the mainstream, tend to be literary—she's made movies out of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Yet she and Perry share some character traits that converged in their backing of Precious. Both have singular vision. Both are classic black strivers who have achieved in the face of overwhelming odds. Both are fundamental optimists whose core message is that self-affirmation and personal (and often in Perry's case, religious) transformation can overcome adversity of all kinds. And though they do it with varying degrees of subtlety, both champion black uplift.

The irony of Precious is that what Winfrey and Perry saw as uplift or simply a compelling story, many other blacks saw as more exploitation of black images, especially images of black poverty, that's been a Hollywood specialty for decades. The Oscar attention has only fueled the controversy, but that controversy has sharpened the focus on an almost existential question: when is a movie about a black character struggling in a ghetto a real story and not a stereotype? With their support of Precious, Winfrey and Perry loudly declared that they know the difference. It will be interesting to see if they make that declaration—with all the inherent risks involved—behind future projects.