On January 25, 2008, shortly after Heath Ledger’s death, I conjectured on whether the actor would win an Oscar posthumously for his portrayal of the Joker in the upcoming movie The Dark Knight. The Heath Ledger Oscar post is here, and examines the chances of actors winning awards after their deaths. It’s a rare feat indeed.

Now, six months later, on the eve of the release of The Dark Knight, critics are echoing what fans have only guessed based on 20 seconds worth of footage, that Heath Ledger should and will receive an Oscar nomination for his role as the Joker. In this article, AP writer David Germain drills into the what-if’s, James Dean and the cautious marketing approach Warner Brothers is taking to tout Ledger’s performance and get him a nomination.

The Dark Knight movie reviews I’ve seen so far for have been just short of heavenly, and Ledger is getting immense praise. At this point, it’s almost certain that Ledger will receive an Oscar nomination. The bigger question is whether he can defy the odds and actually win an Oscar more than a year after his death?

Heath Ledger’s final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, has been in a state of limbo ever since the actor’s death, but things are back on track with the announcement that three actors will be used to play Heath Ledger’s character.

Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell will replace Ledger as the character is transported into three separate dimensions. Terry Gilliam will continue to direct the film, which is now slated for 2009. There is no word on when production will resume.

The coroner announced today that Heath Ledger died as a result of an accidental overdose of about a dozen different prescribed medicines, the belief being that he had been prescribed the drugs by different doctors and thus took something that reacted badly with something else. This is all fine and good, and to save a bit of Ledger’s reputation, the death is ruled “accidental”, but how accidental was his death?

After all, the guy literally had a ridiculous amount of different drugs in his system. How can one determine that he took them all intending to simply get high or go to sleep, rather than commit suicide? I’m not saying he did, but how do we know he didn’t? How much of it is a PR move to protect his image? In Ledger’s father’s quote to the press, he specifies “accidental” as if telling us to believe it.

Of course, we do want to believe it. No one likes to hear that someone committed suicide, especially a celebrity who is appreciated and respected by so many people. You look up to people like this and say, “Man, if I had that life…” It’s just a waste. Of course, according to the death report and everyone else, Ledger’s death isn’t a suicide, and that’s fine. But it is clear that Ledger had a problem with drugs… no sane person, no matter how tired or desperate, would take or even acquire the variety of drugs he had in his system. That’s sad to think about, too, because if he had a problem, someone had to know about it, and that someone could have done something to prevent this.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the Ledger situation. I’ll stop writing about him now, until The Dark Knight comes out, of course.

Johnny Depp is being rumored to replace Heath Ledger in the upcoming Terry Gilliam movie The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which begs the question: if a leading actor dies, what should happen to the film?

My personal belief is that a movie shouldn’t die based on one man alone. After all, there are hundreds of other people involved in the making of a film, and as tragic as Heath Ledger’s death was, should all their work be put to waste? Furthermore, what about the guy who wrote the movie? How would you feel if your work was about to be put into action and then it was stopped indefinitely.

The current status of the The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus movie is that it is on hold, but I’m sure we’ll see an incarnation of it at some point or another. Despite my belief above, according to MovieWeb, filming of the picture was almost complete, which begs another question:

What do you do with all that footage? Obviously, it will be released at some point or another, but if filming was nearly complete, does it make sense to redo all of his scenes with another actor or do something else (CGI, stand-in, what?). Some options might be disrespectful, others financially or artfully inappropriate, but if filming was almost complete, what makes the most sense?

In a recent Sun Times article, co-star Christopher Plummer said that there may be a way to salvage the film without Heath Ledger:Terry Gilliam is “trying to work out at this moment how to continue on. Fortunately, because the film deals with magic, there is a way, perhaps, of turning Heath into other people.”

So what will happen? Who knows. What should happen? I think they should try as hard as they can to finish the film without replacing him. Hell, turn the movie into a homage for Heath Ledger and have someone else play his remaining scenes. Terry Gilliam sure has a tough decision on his hands.

I haven’t seen many blogs discussing this, so I thought I’d raise the question: Could Heath Ledger win an Oscar for his portrayal of The Joker in the upcoming Batman movie The Dark Knight? At the very least, could he receive an Oscar nomination?

The thought is unlikely - after all, action movies - especially action movies based on comic books featuring a man dressed up in a rubber bat suit - are hardly critical fodder for nominations of any sort outside of a few technical awards such as editing and visual effects. Jack Nicholson didn’t receive any major awards, or nominations, for his portrayal of Batman’s arch nemesis - and yet he was praised for his performance and is, at least for a few more months, still considered to have the best comic book villain performance ever.

But… is Academy Award recognition, whether it be through a win or a nomination, that unreasonably for the late Heath Ledger, who died earlier this week from an apparent drug overdose? Let’s look at the possibilities:

• Heath Ledger already has an Oscar nomination for his excellent performance in Brokeback Mountain. Repeat nominees often have a better chance.
• Heath Ledger was a good looking guy, and in his upcoming role, he plays a disfigured psychopath. Oscar voters love good-looking people who make themselves ugly (though this tend to applies more to women than men).
• The Dark Knight is a comic book movie, yes, but of all of the comic book movies that could have had a chance at award nominations, Oscar or otherwise, Batman Begins is the most serious, dramatically significant, character-driven film of them all. Expectations are that The Dark Knight is going to have the same brooding, dark approach to it that the previous film had.
• The Dark Knight is directed for Christopher Nolan, who so far has yet to direct a bad movie. Popular, critically favored directors can help elevate a film and its actors.
• The buzz around Heath Ledger’s performance, even before his death, was and is huge. Snippets of his performance that have been seen in trailers and clips have been downright terrifying.
• It looks like Heath Ledger has transformed himself into the villain of villains, and will do what no other actor has done: to overshadow Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker.
• Some people are blaming Heath Ledger’s death on his devotion and submersion into his role as The Joker; the actor was apparently only sleeping a couple hours a night because The Joker was so disturbing and evil. It is possible that Ledger overdosed on sleeping pills. Essentially, it is possible that Heath Ledger “died” as a result of playing The Joker.
• Heath Ledger is dead. Let’s face it - the emotional vote is in his favor.

To push on my last point a little more, madbeast.com says there are six actors to be nominated for acting Oscars posthumously:

• Jeanne Eagels received a Best Actress nomination months after dying of a Heroin overdose.
• James Dean received two nominations after his fatal car crash.
• Spencer Tracy received his ninth Best Actor nomination after dying.
• Peter Finch died of a heart attack some say was a result of an exhaustive effort to win the Oscar for Network. After WINNING THE AWARD, his costar and fellow nominee William Holden said, “If the son of a bitch
  hadn’t died, I could have won my second Oscar.” Hmm…
• Ralph Richardson died five months before his Tarzan movie was released; he was subsequently nominated.
• Massimo Troisi died a day after completing Il Postino; he received nominations for Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.

So, again, we realize that a Batman film is an unlikely place to find an Oscar-winning performance in any way or form, but actors have been nominated posthumously before. The Dark Knight comes out in the summer, not a very good time to showcase an actor’s capabilities for Oscar voters, but the film will be hitting DVD sometime before Christmas, and it will hit big. Every voter will see the movie, and every voter will be reminded of Heath Ledger’s death.

Until that day, who knows, but it’s certainly an interesting prospect. What do you think?

Some may take offense to the fact that I may appear more concerned about the next Batman movie than Heath Ledger, but that is not my intent with this article. Heath Ledger’s death was shocking and a little depressing, considering that he was a great and underrated actor who, I believe, was on the verge of breaking through to becoming a huge star. But if you are a Batman fan, you must admit that seconds after learning of Heath Ledger’s death, you thought of the upcoming movie The Dark Knight and how it will be affected by the situation.

The good news is that assuming to IMDB, The Dark Knight (2008), directed by Christopher Nolan, is in post-production, which, with exception to a major film fire (knock on wood, Ledger’s scenes should all be complete. Of course, there always chances of needed reshoots or additional scenes to be filmed, but I don’t see Nolan as someone who often does stuff like this - and I don’t see the WB tampering with the director’s vision. I have looked around on the Internet for other articles about this topic, but have yet to find anything too substantial. Most are just re-iterating the news story, which you can read here. The basics are that Ledger fell victim to drug abuse and either accidentally overdosed or killed himself (since he was found surrounded by pills), which is a fuzzy line anyway.

Will The Dark Knight be pushed back at all, my boss asked. Highly unlikely. The Dark Knight is WB’s tentpole release of the summer, and buzz is high. Also, with the film’s release several months away, there is really no emotional obligation to put things on hold. Even if The Dark Knight were to open this Friday, I doubt the WB would push back the release.

Some fans are concerned that the ending of The Dark Knight will be changed. I don’t know what fans have heard, but there seems to be some assumptions that The Joker lives at the end (based on the fact that Ledger allegedly had signed on for a sequel). The worries surround the thought that The Joker may escape at the end, and thus the WB would be forced to deal with a situation where they would have to tie up loose ends. To this, I say these worries are unfounded: more than likely, The Joker will survive (didn’t they learn their lesson with Tim Burton’s Batman?) but will be incarcerated. The other option, if he doesn’t get killed, is that he escapes, though I find this a bit unlikely since The Dark Knight is probably Nolan’s last Batman film - and who would want to end a comic book film with the villain “winning” unless you plan to wrap up the story later on? And even if The Joker does escape, who cares? You can just drop the storyline for the next film or, heaven forbid, get yet another actor to play the creepy Batman foe.

Anyway, unless I hear otherwise, I will assume that all of Heath Ledger’s scenes have been filmed and that the movie will be released on time (presumably with a “In memory of Heath Ledger” at the beginning or end). Of course, with Ledger’s life cut short at age 28, that means we’ve been denied a good fifty or sixty years of quality acting. While some people shrugged Ledger off as a pretty face, remember that he turned in an Oscar-worthy performance in Brokeback Mountain, was great in I’m Not There, and was poised to break out in The Dark Knight. After all, how many actors get so much positive buzz just from a movie trailer?

Check out the sweet new international poster for The Dark Knight: