According to The Daily Telegraph, The Dark Knight has grossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office, which makes it the world’s best performing film in 2008 and Warner Brothers’ best performing film ever. (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which brought in 976 million back in 2001 formerly held the record.)
Because normal people care a lot less about box office gold and more about gold statues, there’s more talk of whether Heath Ledger should win a posthumous Academy Award for his role as the Joker than how much money the film’s raking in. Apparently people winning Oscars from the Great Beyond is nothing novel, but from what we can tell, Ledger might stand a better chance if he was a film composer or going up in the Art Direction category. A Best Supporting Actor nominee has never posthumously won an Oscar and while nominated in consecutively for East of Eden and Giant, James Dean was passed over for a Best Actor award twice.
After the jump find a chronological list of the posthumous Academy Award winners; let us know if you think Ledger deserves a trophy for his work in the comments.
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Google released its annual Zeitgeist report this week, giving the world a chance to view 2008 through the lens of our search habits. Data geeks that they are, they’ve formatted their version of a year-end report not as an easy to read (read: easy to ignore) list, but rather as a collection of numbers, charts, regional segmentations and other showy stuff that we don’t know how to do in Excel.
While we know that the point of the Zeitgeist is to help us understand the state of the Internet world — and be extension, society at large — our first reaction to it was a resounding “Huh? What does this all mean? What’s a ‘nasza klasa’? Where are we? We’re scared.” After the jump, we try our best to sort it all out for you.
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This year’s award picks by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association are in, and while there aren’t any huge shockers to reveal, we think that the subtle differences between the two lists offers an interesting portrait of the coastal divide. Example: As subversive as it might be, can you imagine New Yorkers voting a heartwarming animated flick like Wall-E as Best Picture? Fuggedabouit.
Our stereotype-reinforcing analysis after the jump.
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You don’t have to be a comic book geek to know that best-selling author NEIL GAIMAN, creator of the SANDMAN series (which NORMAN MAILER once called “a comic strip for intellectuals”), is a very big deal.
Aside from writing the gateway drug that opened the genre up to a more widespread demographic, he has penned screenplays, short stories, novels, children’s books, radio plays, and other comics as well.
MICHAEL CHABON has said that he’s “really, really cute,” but as we discovered last night at the 92Y’s Sandman 20th-Anniversary Celebration, hosted by graphic guru CHIP KIDD, this cult hero is also really, really entertaining.
Find out what Gaiman had to say about Captain Kirk, Batman and Hellboy after the jump.
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It’s now the second highest grossing film of all time, and yet WARNER BROTHERS still hasn’t announced a follow-up to this past summer’s THE DARK KNIGHT, nor have they signed CHRISTOPHER NOLAN to direct it. What are they waiting for? Is some moronic studio exec hoping to see HEATH LEDGER jump out from behind the black curtain wearing a smile and a t-shirt that reads, “I Faked My Own Death, Helped Warner Bros. Make Ridiculous Amounts of Money and All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt!”?
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1. TINA FEY – everyone will think you’re SARAH PALIN
2. Anyone from the cast of GOSSIP GIRL or THE HILLS – you’re way too old
3. DANIEL RADCLIFFE/ALAN STRANG – full frontal nudity = not okay
4. HEATH LEDGER/THE JOKER – it’s in bad taste
5. Anyone from the cast of SEX AND THE CITY – unless you’re doing it in drag — that’s ok
6. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE – it’s in really bad taste
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