Ranpitsu

It looks like they might bring this one in at under three hours, so I’ll curb my complaining. And I’ll close by noting that this seemed not only like a relatively brief Oscar ceremony, but a small one. Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come. Like it or not, the movies have lost their pop-cultural supremacy, and the fate of the Oscars may either be to go after a vanished mass appeal or to scale down, acknowledge the shrinking of the audience and turn into something like the Tonys. More of a coterie affair, appealing to the aficionados and the curious. It would be an honorable outcome.

I worked the Oscar circuit in 2006 and watched Mr. Ledger in support of “Brokeback Mountain,” then a favorite for best picture, and can say he never was much of a campaigner. A polite, nice man, he had little aptitude or appetite for trite talk at parties or events, even when he was up for a best actor Oscar, as he was then. For “The Dark Knight” the studio has eschewed any R.I.P. allusions in its trade advertising, instead relying on a steady (and not frantic) visual presence of somebody now best known for his absence, showing him in various guises: the crazed man in the nurse’s uniform, the immovable object standing in the middle of the street.