Oscar smackdown: Nixon vs. Batman?

updated 6:38 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2008

LOS ANGELES - It promises to be a colorful Academy Awards season when films featuring Richard Nixon and Batman could go toe-to-toe for best picture.

Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon,” featuring Frank Langella as the bad boy of American politics, might end up in a showdown with Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” which offers Heath Ledger as the Joker in a new standard for bad boys in the comic-book world.

When it arrived last summer as Hollywood’s biggest blockbuster in years, “The Dark Knight” was viewed as a likely Oscar contender for Ledger and for technical categories. A supporting-actor slot at the Oscar nominations Jan. 22 would come on the one-year anniversary of Ledger’s death.

Awards watchers figured a Batman movie probably would not find much favor with snooty Oscar voters when it came to the top category, but the best-picture buzz has gotten stronger for “The Dark Knight” as studios unveiled their late-year prestige films.

Having “The Dark Knight” in the mix certainly could help the Oscar ceremony’s TV ratings, which have slumped in recent years as smaller films such as “No Country for Old Men” and “Crash” dominated.

“We know that the most successful Oscars tend to be the ones that include the big, popular blockbusters like ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Titanic,’ in terms of just people in America caring about the show,” said Tom O’Neil, a columnist for the awards Web site TheEnvelope.com. “You could argue whether or not ‘The Dark Knight’ is the best movie of the year, but you can’t argue the fact that it was the movie of the year, the most talked-about movie.”

Others among the potentially lively lineup for Hollywood’s big party: a racist war vet (Clint Eastwood, “Gran Torino”); a slain gay-rights politico (Sean Penn, “Milk”); an old-school nun (Meryl Streep, “Doubt”); an addict upstaging her sister’s wedding (Anne Hathaway, “Rachel Getting Married”); a has-been wrestler (Mickey Rourke, “The Wrestler”); a mom with an impostor son (Angelina Jolie, “Changeling”); and a guy born old who ages backward toward infancy (Jolie’s man, Brad Pitt, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”).

Second nomination for an actor portraying Nixon
Some critics are calling “Frost/Nixon” the best work yet from Howard, who already has delivered best-picture and director Oscars for “A Beautiful Mind.” Reprising the role he created on stage, Langella is a marvel of awkward hubris and tragic grandeur as Nixon, squaring off against TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) in a series of pivotal 1977 interviews.

Langella could be the second person nominated as best actor for playing the fallen president, following Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s 1995 film biography “Nixon.”

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“Nixon’s a fascinating paradox. He was a great intellect with a lot of important ideas and made some real political inroads on a sort of global level. And yet he’s a classically tragic figure,” Howard said. “Some people who worked with him closely said he always felt like he was the kid on the outside looking into the toy store, nose pressed to the glass. He was so uncomfortable in his own skin, and yet brilliant and biting and tough.”

Stone’s 2008 presidential picture, the George W. Bush saga “W.”, looks like a longshot for major nominations, though it could sneak in for some of the performances.

The prolific Eastwood released two films within a couple of months that are grabbing major Oscar attention, “Changeling” and “Gran Torino.”

Kate Winslet also has two films in the mix: the domestic drama “Revolutionary Road,” her reunion with “Titanic” co-star Leonardo DiCaprio; and the Holocaust-themed story “The Reader.” “Revolutionary Road” was directed by Winslet’s husband, Sam Mendes, an Oscar winner for “American Beauty.”

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