The schedule for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival has been announced and the American representation is at it’s lightest since 2006. Of the notable films on this years schedule: Quentin Tarantino will be screening his Inglorious Basterds, Sam Raimi will be screening his finished print of Drag Me To Hell, Ang Lee brings Talking Woodstock with Emile Hersch, Liev Schreiber, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan to France, and Terry Gilliam will bring the real last Heath Ledger film, Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. And, of course, UP’s historic opening spot.

But what does the WGA have to do with this craziness…

Last night, when Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, a callous part of my inner monologue thought: well, now I can shut down the Heath Ledger specialty category.

Also this weekend, I was Twittered the good news: The Dark Knight has cross the $1 Billion dollar threshold for total gross last Friday, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of all time, behind Titanic ($1.84 billion), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.12 billion) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ($1.07 billion). Eating Batman’s dust is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with $974.7 million.

Heath Ledger brought Oscar-caliber work to the franchise, and Christopher Nolan delivered one of the superhero movies we’ll be talking about for a decade.

What to say about the SAG Awards?

Well, for a Union that really haven’t been able to get their sh*t together for an entire year, they sure know how to take all the excitement out of the Oscar Race.

Kate Winslet swept in for The Reader as Best Supporting Actress, adding it on to her Golden Glob and making her the front-runner for the Academy Award, Heath Ledger nabbed another posthumous win for The Dark Knight, Merryl Streep too the top lady’s acting prize for Doubt and Slumdog Millionaire took “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture,” which made me scratch my head: how many Slumdog Millionaire cast members are SAG signatories? By now, I’m guessing all of them.

Outside of Merryl, the rest of the winners fell into place. Which is why you can see the complete list of winners HERE, but on The Bad & Ugly, you get the least ugly of the night’s female stars. Namely; Eva Longoria, Katie Holmes, Amy Poehler, Penelope Cruz, Olivia Wilde, Holly Hunter, Anne Hathaway, Jenna Fischer, and Evan Rachel Wood.

This morning, at 5:30AM LA time, the Academy Awards announced their nominees for the February 22nd broadcast. Some things we predicted were right, others went missing between prediction and announcement, and one thing we’re sure about is Heath Ledger’s posthumous nomination: it happened.

The Dark Knight managed not to garner a best picture nod, or a best adapted screenplay nod, or even an original score nod, but it did score nominations across the technical categories like art direction, cinematography, editing, make-up, sound editing and visual effects.

For it’s lack of creatively-motivated categories, The Dark Knight did nab 8 nominations, only putting it behind two other films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (13 noms) and favored Best Picture contender Slumdog Millionaire 10 noms.

More nominees inside!

Ok, okay, okay, okay.

Yes, as far as I know, we don’t know anything about Batman 3. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this multiple times over several crazy Batman 3 rumors (most recently with some Penguin fan art), but a few comments have been made over the first weeks of 2009 that open things up for creative and industry speculation.

I will attempt to collect and reconcile them within…

It happened, Heath Ledger won the Golden Globe for his Joker role in The Dark Knight. There’s a big difference between Best Supporting Actor for the academy and Best Performance by an Actor In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for the Hollywood Foreign Press, but the above For Your Consideration Ad has been running in trade magazines, and the fan response is similar…

Eeeehh. If Warner Bros initially spoke about removing the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker pretends to be dead in a bodybag, then - from the looks of these stills - whomever picks up Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is going to have a little dilemma on their hands.

It will probably help that when Ledger died half-way through filming his part, Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell stepped in to take over his role. This is supposed to be a fantasy-filled film, so it’s very possible the three A-listers pulled it off. But…geez. There the guy is, strung up on a noose.

These photos have been blown up a bit, but they aren’t the only stills that have leaked onto the net recently…