This Post is an elaboration on a comment I made AT Justin’s Blog.

Just about everyone’s grandma has seen this movie by this point, but if I recall correctly people were clamoring for Heath Ledger to have a posthumous Oscar nomination well before the The Dark Knight was even released with a great number of fanboys exalting it as the best film ever without even seeing it. So who has won a posthumous Oscar?

There was Peter Finch who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar with Network. However that was a ’serious’ film with Sidney Lumet at the helm, who already had two Oscar nominations for best director prior to it. It was a prestige film and damn it there isn’t a doubt in my mind that Finch would have won that Oscar dead or alive.

I may have said even in my own review that Ledger deserved an Oscar for the Joker, and I won’t admit to being caught up in hype (my review score still stands mind you) but upon retrospection his character doesn’t exactly have an arc. He’s powerfully written as a tour de force and Ledger does the job. But he does not have an arc. He’s like Emperor Palpatine. Just flat out bad. Aaron Eckhart’s Dent is more likely or at least deserving of an Oscar  nomination(by comparison) since his performance actually went places, going from Gotham’s White Knight to Two Face during the film’s running time.

Also most people who have been part of these discussions forget we haven’t even gotten to the Oscar movie season yet. If anyone remembers Road to Perdition it got screwed out of many awards because A. It was based on a graphic novel and B. It was released in the Summer. Most Oscar voters suffer from severe Alzheimer, so forgive them if they forget every movie released prior to September.

I don’t think it’s impossible for genre movies to win Oscars. Just look at Titanic(disaster movie with a poorly written love story) and Return of the King. Mind you Return of the King did not get a single nomination for acting. They tried to get Gollum a nomination… and he had a personal arc.

If only they had said that the Joker was retarded( a noble one) then he’d be a shoo-in.

Related Posts:

1. The Dark Knight (2008)
2. Say it isn’t so…
3. Variety attacks Jim Carrey’s acting… for shame!
4. Stephen King & David Lynch: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
5. The Diving Bell And the Butterfly (2007)

Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Dark Knight, Heath Ledger, Joker, Network, oscar, Peter Finch, rant, soapbox, Titanic