MOVIES: Wish you were here

  Everybody who sees “The Dark Knight” in the next few days — and that’s a lot of Batmaniacs — undoubtedly will leave the theater with a variety of reactions.
  Including one inescapable one: regret and sadness for all the Heath Ledger performances we’ll never get to see.
  Ledger’s lightning-in-a-bottle portrayal as the Joker so dominates “The Dark Knight” that there’s already Oscar talk swirling around it. (He deserved a best actor Oscar a few years ago for his heartbreaking, taciturn turn in “Brokeback Mountain,” but we all know what happened there.)
  Ledger’s hardly the only performer to dominate the spotlight posthumously, though.
  Last year’s indie charmer “Waitress,” for example, served as a fitting tribute to writer, director and co-star Adrienne Shelly — who was murdered at age 40 in November 2006, never knowing her little movie would become a fan favorite at the Sundance film festival the following January.
  And 1994’s “The Crow” gains even more haunting impact with the knowledge that star Brandon Lee — Bruce Lee’s son, playing a murdered rock star whose vengeful spirit returns to Earth — was accidentally shot dead while filming the movie.
  Alas, the same can’t be said for poor Aaliyah, who was killed in a 2001 plane crash, thereby sparing her the knowledge that her first, and only, starring performance — in 2002’s horror bomb “Queen of the Damned” — was hardly the beginning of a successful movie career.
  But even if Ledger makes it into Oscar’s final five next year, he won’t be the first posthumous nominee.
  That legendary rebel without a cause, James Dean, was nominated for best actor not once but twice after his death in a 1955 car crash: for 1955’s “East of Eden” and 1956’s “Giant.” And the co-writer and star of 1994’s poignant “Il Postino (The Postman),” Massimo Troisi, postponed heart surgery to play the title role; he died the day after the movie was finished, but still got a best actor Oscar nomination.
  Screenwriter Sidney Howard became the Academy’s first posthumous winner when he was killed in a 1939 farm accident prior to the ceremony where “Gone With the Wind” collected eight competitive Oscars, including one for his script.
  But those who saw Peter Finch’s indelible performance as “Network’s” Howard Beale, “the mad prophet of the airwaves,” were sad as hell he couldn’t pick up his best actor Oscar in person; he died of a heart attack in January 1977, a few months before the ceremony.
 So far, Finch is the only actor to have won this competitive category posthumously; we’ll know on Jan. 22, 2009, when the nominations are announced, if Ledger has a chance to join him.