How To Best Campaign For a Dead Oscar Nominee? Don’t

Just because Heath Ledger was a favourite to claim this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar since before The Dark Knight even opened, that doesn’t mean he can’t use a gentle, posthumous awards-season studio nudge.

But how gentle is “gentle”? David Carr asks and mostly answers that question in today’s NYT, best characterising Warner Bros.’ strategy as some balance of print ads and ignoring press requests for comment. Which is no doubt working, as is the self-perpetuating momentum of critical and Globes plaudits. Yet oddly downplayed in the equation is the viability of a dead nominee — especially one of Ledger’s stature, talent and now legend. Beyond the obvious boost for a film just theatrically re-released, why would Warner’s spend any money pushing Ledger for an award his untimely death and ensuing mythology has bought and paid for already?

That’s not to say Ledger’s performance isn’t excellent, awards-worthy, iconic, whatever, and Academy voters will reward it in accordance with its “competition” — a dude in blackface, the guy who killed Harvey Milk, Revolutionary Road’s token nod and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stole the 2005 acting Oscar that Ledger deserved in the first place for Brokeback Mountain. As Carr points out (and we recall from first-hand experience), Ledger was a lousy campaigner then.

His ghost, however, is not, which makes Warner’s job much less complicated than today’s survey implies. The studio’s marketers are really the only ones who can get in his way, and it’s mildly surprising they’d hazard the exploitation factor naturally accompanying Ledger’s Oscar ads. We know that’s “the way it’s done” and everything, but it’s not like it has to be. If the guy’s grown wings, jumping on his back seems worse than ghoulish. It’s just senseless.

• Delicately Campaigning for a Star Now Departed [NYT]