Heath Ledger just won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work as The Joker in The Dark Knight.

As his mother, father, and sister accepted the Oscar on his behalf, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Nor was there a dry eye in mine.

Though the articles reaching back several years might suggest I’ve been running this blog for a long time, most of them were added retroactively. (The old stuff is here.) I started this blog almost entirely for the purpose of following the production of The Dark Knight, because I still can’t believe we’re lucky enough to live in a world where Christian Bale is Batman and a filmmaker as thoughtful and as capable as Christopher Nolan sits in the director’s chair. I couldn’t wait to see what the talented people who made Batman Begins would come up with next, and no casting decision excited me as much as Nolan’s genius decision to put Heath Ledger behind the makeup of Batman’s most famous and dangerous adversary.

Every time I watch the finished product, I feel as if there’s an alternate universe where Batman and The Joker really live, and that Heath somehow traded places for a few months with the real Joker. That’s how good he is in this film. In fact, if I hadn’t known ahead of time that Heath was playing The Joker, I couldn’t have told you when it was over that it had been Heath.

I don’t write on the blog very much anymore because I’ve got lots of other writing projects going on, but the reason I started it in the first place is never far from my heart.

Thank you, Heath, for doing what you did and for making it seem so beautifully effortless. And congratulations for an honor both earned and deserved.