So I recently saw the new Batman movie, The Dark Night, and yes, it was the best comic book movie I’ve ever seen. The late Heath Ledger turned out a sublime performance as the deeply disturbing Joker. This is not your parents Joker, folks. He is psychotic and scary as hell. He fancies himself an agent of chaos and is all the more scary because he has no rhyme or reason, no masterplan beyond just watching everything burn. At one point he says to the Batman, “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.”
It was a very good movie with at least one very good perfomance. But will it become the first comic book movie to win a Best Picture Oscar? Every fanboy and -girl on the internet says it will. I say it’s a long shot. There are still many movies to come out between now and Oscar time, movies that will be made specifically with the little naked gold man in mind. Ledger may very well get a posthumous nomination in the Supporting Actor category, and his performance has at least a 50-50 chance of capturing the Oscar. But that’s it for The Dark Knight. Unless we get a strange influx of very crappy movies between now and the end of the year, Batman will not be placing the gold statuette in the cave next to the giant penny.
