When “The Dark Knight” started screening earlier this month, some of the more breathless “critics” (we use this term lightly, these ones were on-air TV hacks) started banging the drum for the “Heath Ledger should win an Oscar” campaign. As were wont to do, we got annoyed at people making early proclamations out of their ass.
Then we saw the film and thought there might be something to all this Oscar talk as Ledger’s slippery and electrical performance, which evades a lot of predictable beats, was rather amazing. Even then we’re still not completely convinced and we’re not totally ruling it out. We’re marinating on it (something bang the drum fools should try once and a while), it’s early days people and we don’t know what’s in store for the rest of the year.
However, according to Reuters, “Oscar watchers and veteran critics,” are starting to dismiss this notion claiming it was started by Internet buzz and loser bloggers. Wait one second! Normally, we’d agree with you fanboy bloggers are usually the first to make these pronouncements, but the first person to actually proclaim that Ledger would be a lock for an Oscar nom was L.A. TV critic hack Sam Rubin. Not a loser blogger at all, but rather a loser talking head movie critic. (sounding much like an IMDB message board geek he wrote, “Ledger is THE BEST villain in a super hero movie of all time!”).
Back to Reuters’ story. They remind us all that while people like James Dean and Spencer Tracy were nominated after their deaths, only one person has ever won an Oscar posthumously and that was Peter Finch for 1976’s “Network” (a Best Actor Oscar no less; the award was accepted by his widow and he bested Robert DeNiro’s “Taxi Driver” performance)
“All this Oscar talk is a phenomenon of the Internet age that I like to call ‘a wish-fulfillment rumor.’ If people say it often enough, they think it will happen,” “Entertainment Tonight” film critic Leonard Maltin said. Then again, when was the last time anyone gave a fuck what Leonard Maltin said?
Tom O’Neil from The Envelope.com, said “it really looks good” for a nomination but was “a long shot” to win. The fact that Tracy and Dean were denied posthumous Oscars O’Neil thinks is evidence that Academy voters would rather vote for someone alive so as not to make it a solemn affair. “That’s how reluctant Oscar voters are to hug the dead,” O’Neil said. “These awards are all about hugs and there’s something creepy about embracing the dead.”
Great, a Reuters posit based on two critics, one who hasn’t aged, changed his look or been relevant since the heydays of John Tesh. Ledger was beloved in Hollywood, he has that. So a nomination could happen, but yeah, an Oscar win does seem dubious at this point. But it is early days.
As our buddy Otis, the EIC from Dusted magazine, recently articulated rather well to us recently, “The Dark Knight” could have trouble being taken overly-serious by some critics and audiences (though to be fair to the context, he thinks Ledger is a shoe-in). “It tried to be a gritty crime drama, [but those films] need to have some semblance of believability. The Joker’s series of crimes simply aren’t. You need to seriously suspend disbelief, which is totally fine and expected in superhero movies (it’s why we go to them in the first place), but not in 5-star dramas. I felt that this film tried to be both and didn’t quite pull it off.”
We insert that here because we think he has a point. Also, another critical review from TimeOut new York today. Their biggest beef is the running time, the crammed-in too-many themes and the failed attempt to balance action and drama (“this is Batman, not Bergman”). “The fact that Nolan’s padded popcorn flick isn’t the streamlined masterpiece it could have been is a real buzzkill,” writes very respectable critic David Fear.
