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The Film Blog

We were going to call this this section the 'flog' (see what we did there), but thought we might bring in the wrong crowd. This is where the house reviewers regularly post to their random thoughts vaguely on the subject of film.

Heath Ledger - Posthumous Oscar   Robin

18th July 2008

I mentioned this subject briefly in Paul’s earlier Batman post, but it seems to be coming back into the news due to the imminent release of The Dark Knight in the UK.

What do people think? For many years I have been a firm believer that if you are artist and you die before your time, people will perceive you and your work differently. Whether its out of consideration or just good taste, it becomes virtually impossible to criticise the recently deceased.

Consider this – how many of you are fans of, say, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Belushi, James Dean etc etc? Do you think people start looking for things in these artists films/lyrics/interviews that isn’t actually there? I, like everyone else want to gain an insight into what is potentially a very troubled mind. A premature death leaves everyone asking questions.

Heath may get the Oscar. He may well deserve it. The Joker, as we know, is a huge role to get your teeth into, and as I’ve said before, if you play someone slightly deranged, you stand a good chance of getting an Oscar nod. You play someone from history/real person, you’ll probably get a nomination too. But, if you play someone with BOTH traits, ie a historical nutter, then you are a shoe-in.

There have been criticisms of the actors and the studio that by mentioning the posthumous Oscar, they are just trying to drum up publicity. Not so. Given the circumstances, all kinds of publicity was inevitable. The calibre and standing of the actor who died, the movie itself (It's Batman!), the success of the first film, the character the deceased actor is playing – these are all HUGE reasons on there own for this kind of film to get the focus its getting. Combine them and you’d have to be mad to write Ledger off for this award.

BUT, only ONCE before has an actor been given this accolade after death. Could it happen again?

Related films : The Dark Knight |

Tags: Batman Heath-Ledger Dark-Knight