Heath Ledger, Best Supporting Actor

Warner Bros. is apparently pushing to Heath Ledger for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. At first we were looking forward to such a thing, viewing it has an apology for not winning one for Brokeback Mountain. However, watching the way that critics have started to rally around the film has put it in a different perspective. Now it seems that the push is not so much to honour Ledger, who died back in January just as promotions for the movie began, lending an air of tradgedy to his portayal of the Joker, but rather to give legitimacy to movies based on comic books as serious films. By extension, this legitimacy would extend to comic books themselves.

It seems about right that we are going through this cultural acceptance of comic books and graphic novels. Other genres, like the Western, have been through it as well. The successes of movies like Unforgiven and Brokeback Mountain came decades after the genre was pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s. 

In a larger perspective, this is perhaps signalling the momentum of the cultural shift that we have talked about elsewhere, i.e. as members of those generations raised in the primarily visual medium of television, movies, and yes comic books, mature to become cultural producers, they seek to validate the myths that they grew up with.

We'll write more about this in a few days.