by Augusto Na

Created on: March 15, 2009   Last Updated: March 16, 2009

No Oscar For You:

"Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life," the Victorian novelist George Eliot once said.

For once, she is correct. Acting, like almost anything in life, can be likened to a game. The Academy Awards, then, are the World Series for acting. The problem with any paradigm is that it is very hard to fairly determine which actor is the best at the game. The Academy voters are not unbiased. They are more likely to reward big, flashy roles. They also seem to be especially smitten with art house roles, which is the only way to explain how Phillip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for Capote. More often than not, the Academy voters will get it wrong. Paul Newman lost seven times before finally winning, for example. However, the Oscars have always tried to be a fair and accurate barometer of the best films each year, and giving Heath Ledger an Oscar for The Dark Knight would undermine that goal.

Ledger deserves a nomination, either for Best Supporting Actor or for Best Actor. He would only be the seventh actor to be nominated after death. His performance as the Joker was one of the best this year. The problem is that it was not the best and therefore does not deserve to win. There were many actors who should win over Ledger. Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD comes to mind. He has a tear-jerking six-minute monologue that is absolutely spell-binding. Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road is also a strong candidate. He only appears in three scenes, but that would just be history repeating itself after William Hurt got nominated in 2005 after appearing in only a couple of scenes in A History of Violence. Ben Kingsley has several roles that could be nominated, the most deserving being his turn as David in Elegy, where Ben Kingsley perfectly mirrors his character's change by completely breaking down his mannerisms and speech pattern.

Sure, counting on the Academy voters to only think about the acting craft while they are filling out their ballots might just be wishful thinking. Many will give in to the hype surrounding the performance. Others will be pressured to vote for Ledger for business reasons. After all, last year Oscar viewing hit an all time low and having Ledger win the Oscar would increase both publicity and viewership. Having any of the actors I just mentioned win the top acting prize would be a terrible business idea. They are mostly no-names in small-time movies almost no one will ever see, which would further alienate the general public and lead to less people tuning in. Yet just because it will make the Academy money is not a reason for handing out awards. If the voters want to try to mantain the Oscar's already shaky prestige, then they should not award Heath Ledger with an Oscar. The challenge is to see beyond the hype, beyond the money, beyond the grief and to see which actor brings the most life to the screen, who humanizes life. Only by choosing that actor will the Academy voters triumph.

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