An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since Heath Ledger's death was the result of his own recklessness, he therefore should not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight. "It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger," Lucas begins. "He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death. ... Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around."
Lucas asserts that Ledger's performance isn't all that great anyway -- "a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia," he calls it -- but that's irrelevant to his larger point. It would seem that even if Ledger's Joker truly did represent the finest acting of the year, his personal behavior should disqualify him from Oscar consideration.
To Lucas I say this: Wanna watch me make this pencil disappear?
I actually agree with a lot of what he writes about how certain people's drug- or alcohol-fueled deaths make them more iconic than they would have been otherwise. Did Kurt Cobain's suicide rob my generation of its greatest poet? Nah. I think the only group that really suffered a major loss when Cobain died was the heroin industry. And I think it's silly when people talk about getting emotional when they see Ledger in The Dark Knight, as if the death of someone they never met still makes them misty-eyed all these months later. So let it not be said that I am not a heartless bastard.
My beef with Lucas is his ludicrous assertion that the manner of Ledger's death should have any bearing whatsoever on his Oscar-worthiness. Here's what should be taken into account when you consider acting awards: the acting. What's up there on the screen is all that matters. The Academy Awards aren't meant to be seals of approval on people's personal lives. Even if Ledger had died in the act of machine-gunning a busload of American-flag-draped orphans, it would have nothing to do with the quality of his film performance.
Roman Polanski is a convicted rapist. Frank Sinatra was a two-fisted drunk with Mafia connections. Lewis Carroll was probably a pedophile. Henry Ford hated Jews. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Do none of them deserve the praise they got for their professional work? Just how flawless does a person's life have to be for their creative efforts to have any merit?
Furthermore, when Polanski won an Oscar for directing The Pianist, nobody said, "Well, I guess that means the Academy endorses the drugging and sexual exploitation of 13-year-olds!" What people said was, "I guess that means the Academy thought Polanski's work merited an Oscar." Giving Ledger an Academy Award isn't going to send any message other than "he gave a great performance," period.
Lucas believes that people are praising Ledger's performance only because he's dead. The problem with this theory is that people were talking about Ledger's work as the Joker before he died, too. When Entertainment Weekly's Benjamin Svetkey visited the set last summer, Ledger was "all that anyone working on the movie want[ed] to talk about." I don't doubt that Ledger's death has tinted some people's analysis of his performance, but it's arrogant and presumptuous to insist that those of us praising him have somehow been deluded or misled by the facts of his demise.
Like I said, I'm a cold, insensitive jerk who has no personal connection to Ledger's death whatsoever, and I think his performance is brilliant. I'd think the same thing if he were still alive, or if he had punched my mother in the face, or if he had once married Paris Hilton. None of that matters. What he does in The Dark Knight is what matters, and that's the only thing the Academy should consider.
1. *Begins slow clap*
Posted at 10:20PM on Aug 1st 2008 by Justin Meltzer