This is the second of a four-part series of films that had Oscar buzz during their years, and why they deserved such attention.
There's a parallel here. Come Oscar Sunday 2020, the title Joker will be mentioned many times between the 11 awards it's nominated for (including Best Picture), plus the ones it might win. The Todd Phillips film has taken the movie world by storm (good and bad) and it's garnered awards praise in quantities rarely seen in a film based on a comic book character. THAT BEING SAID...the focus of this here piece will be on one past Oscar-winning film centered partly around the same character. Yes, I'm talking about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008). The most talked-about film of 2008 served as a spiritual predecessor for what we're seeing in the success of Joker.
This isn't a comparison, but rather, a parallel. The Dark Knight had a lot of hype coming into 2008, but that anticipation only heightened upon the learning of the death of Heath Ledger that January, some six months before the film was released. The result? A powerhouse film for the ages, taken to a supreme level by Ledger's performance as The Joker. More than a superhero movie, Nolan created an awe-striking crime thriller that would have been just as compelling if the characters didn't go by the names of comic book characters. The constant misdirections, the reveal of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the grappling of morals and code, make for this as appointment viewing every year (let alone multiple viewings at the theaters when it came out in July of 2008).
The Dark Knight crawled so that Joker could run. The stories of both films are different. But take a good look and notice there are certain similarities within the tired "We Live In A Society": The haves and have nots, mental illness, domestic terrorism, law enforcement/political corruption, etc. Joker is more in your face (and quite frankly, obvious) with all those issues. TDK did it in a cleaner, more subtle way in that it was fronted by the Batman (Christian Bale) v. Joker showdown.
In saying this in no way I mean that Nolan's film was forgotten in awards. Quite the contrary, it got eight Academy Award nominations and it won two (Best Sound Editing and Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger). The gripe people have is that it wasn't nominated for Best Picture. That year, the nominees were Slumdog Millionaire (which won), Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon. Did it deserve to be part of THAT field? You be the judge. This writer certainly thinks so.
It was the controversial decision to leave TDK off that triggered the change of expanding the Best Picture field to up to 10, to allow opportunities for more quality fan favorites to be nominated. That was finally seen when Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture for the year 2018.
In the end, as good as the 2008 nominated films were, people generally hold TDK in higher regard, even more than a decade later. Unfortunately, it took the hit of that bad decision to provoke conversation for future films of the same ilk. Again, this was not a comparison between the singular works of Phillips and Nolan (at least, not my intention). Both stories are different, the execution of both films was different and both are praised on their own merits. Make no mistake, though, there is no Joker without The Dark Knight.
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