From somewhere near the intersection of Hype and Necrophilia comes this AP report assessing a dead guy’s Oscar chances for a performance none of us regular folk have seen yet. I realize it’s rare to find anything crass or tasteless about the Academy Awards, but even by the usual standards this piece sticks in my craw. (And I really like to keep my craw free of offending blockages.)
In case you’ve been doing missionary work with that recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, it seems that Heath Ledger, who died in January, plays the Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight. Within minutes of his death there were murmurs about a possible posthumous Oscar nomination, but that was before anyone had seen his performance. Now that a few insiders have seen it, the murmurs have become a dull roar that promises to become much, much duller but totally inescapable over the next six months or so.
“Jack Nicholson's Joker was a blast,” writes David Germain. “Heath Ledger's Joker is as dark and anarchic a figure as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the role that brought Nicholson his first Academy Award. Ledger's performance in the Batman tale The Dark Knight is so remarkable that next Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of his death, he could become just the seventh actor in Oscar history to earn a posthumous nomination.”
Germain goes on to quote an assortment of luminaries, all of whom agree that Ledger is Brando, Olivier, Nicholson and Cesar Romero all rolled into one. I hope it’s true, and I am looking forward to the movie and the performance, although the hype is beginning to make my left eye twitch uncontrollably. Is there not something a little unseemly about the need to turn Ledger into another James Dean? Germain writes, “The aura surrounding Ledger since his death is a sign that, like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time…That will not necessarily improve his Oscar chances. Dean had two shots after his death and lost both.” Gee, he must have been all broken up about that.
Related:
The Joker's Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?
Batman: The Lost Years