Heath Ledger did a number of remarkable things in his life, and now, more than a year after his death, he has inadvertently had a hand in perhaps the most amazing feat of his career: he's inspired The New York Times to use the word "graciousness" in reference to a studio-mounted Oscar campaign. Almost as soon as The Dark Knight, featuring Ledger's bravura final performance as the Joker, hit theaters, people have been asking whether Ledger might win an Oscar for it. At first, this seemed like spillover from the public mourning period that Ledger's untimely death set off. Now that Ledger has been officially nominated for Best Supporting Actor, the prospect of his winning the award carries the additional weight of the support for the movie itself. The Dark Knight was that rarity, a well-reviewed commercial blockbuster and pop culture event, and a lot of people thought it had a shot at being nominated for Best Picture, but in the end, Ledger's nomination, as well as nominations in a slew of technical-award categories (editing, sounds, make-up, etc.), were all the recognition that it got from the Academy. And this in a year where the movies that were nominated in the Best Picture category seem perversely selected to make 2008 seem like a worse year for movies than it was. With the possible exception of Milk, none of this year's nominees got uniformly better reviews than The Dark Knight, and a couple of them, notably The Reader, did much, much worse.

The Oscar campaigns that people talk about for years until they enter Hollywood legend are the ones, such as Chill Wills's for The Alamo and Diana Ross's for Lady Sings the Blues, that are seen as so aggressive and tasteless that they manage to gross out even the hardened cynics of Hollywood. It's not that often that you heat about a campaign that's notable for how gingerly it's being conducted, but this is an unusual situation. It's not wholly unprecedented for an actor to be posthumously nominated for an Academy Award, and not even unprecedented for one to win, but the precedents tend to emphasize what's special about this case. Peter Finch, who won for Best Actor for 1976's Network, had died shortly before the nominations were announced, but the movie was already in theaters and Finch was on tour promoting it when his heart gave out. More recently, in 1996 the Italian actor Massimo Troisi was nominated for his starring role in Il Postino, almost two years after he died shortly after shooting on that film wrapped, but his nomination was a fondly sentimental gesture to an actor who before his death was unknown in the U.S. Ledger's nomination, which seems unlikely to make the actor any more famous or to earn the movie a single additional dollar in DVD revenue, seems to be devoid of the usual political calculations that drive these things, unless the central calculation was that to not recognize Ledger's performance would have left the Academy looking ridiculous. David Carr writes that "Warner Brothers has managed to walk the line between elegy and ghoulishness, reminding the public and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that one of the great performances in 2008 was the last of Mr. Ledger’s career, but doing so without seeming to commodify his death," adding that "The specter of Mr. Ledger has created a large overhang this award season. His performance was recognized with victories at both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild ceremonies. And what would usually be moments for agent thanking and mom waving suddenly became something as solemn and reverent as an observance at Arlington." Carr also notes that the non-campaign campaign has met with the approval of blogger and Ledger-booster Sasha Stone. "“They had to walk a tightrope there, and no one really knew if they could,” she saus. "The studio didn’t flood the press with Dark Knight ads, and they really could have.”