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.

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Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."

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A fresh wave of media attention, including a profile in Time magazine by Rebecca Winters Keegan and a New York Times piece by David Carr, make it clear that this summer is penciled in to be the one that takes Robert Downey, Jr. to the next level. It is hard to think of a reason to root against him. Downey, who was born in 1965, first appeared on-screen in movies directed by his father, who didn't used to have be called Robert Downey, Sr. to avoid confusion: the 1970 Pound, in which the actors pretended to be caged dogs and young Bob was supposed to be a puppy, and the 1972 Greaser's Palace, in which he was a shot dead in a Western setting, and for which he was prepared form his challenging role with a speech about how he was being pressed into service because dad wasn't really into the child-labor laws. In 1985, he was invited to join the cast of Saturday Night Live at the insistence of the then-hot Anthony Michael Hall, who Lorne Michaels wanted badly for the show, and who Downey subsequently smoked. In the fall of 1987, he starred in James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, which confirmed that he could carry a lightweight comedy on the strength of his talent and charm, and played the fast-sinking buddy of the hero in Less Than Zero, which confirmed that he could take on a thinly written role in an unwatchable mess of a movie and use it to burn an indelible mark in a corner of the screen.

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David Carr's story in the New York Times — posted yesterday — is a typical trend piece. Entertainment journalism (and, hence, people like me, admittedly) couldn't survive without the occasional story that identifies three or more roughly similar things happening at roughly the same time and concludes that it means something important; still, Carr's piece struck me as particularly off the mark. He concludes that we're in for a renaissance of movies about rock music: he cites documentaries on Tom Petty, plus features like Across The Universe (The Beatles), I'm Not There (Bob Dylan) and break-out hit Once.

What Carr seems to be getting out, without being really aware of it, is how the rock biopic has displaced any other kind of biopic, with VH1's Behind The Music cited as the prototype for every rise-and-fall arc peddled. "We all know these stories from VH1’s Behind the Music, and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them," weighs in Judd Apatow, apropos of his upcoming spoof Walk Hard. (We do?) The real question is, why are biopics nowadays seemingly all about musicians just old enough to be canonized — where are the artists (it's been years since Pollock), politicians and writers? When Richard Attenborough stopped churning out stuff like Gandhi and Shadowlands, did the genre die? If so, why?

The cynical, probably correct answer, is "because these movies suck." Still, it's a question worth thinking about; boomers are getting older and more secure about canonizing previously disreputable idols. Notice how Carr doesn't cite Musician (a recent documentary about jazz avant-gardist Ken Vandermark), Dig! (the indie-music bible featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols), or Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. It's not a rock renaissance, it's another smug round of cultural gentrification. I smell another think piece coming on; hire me, New York Times! — Vadim Rizov