Ledger Daughter to Get Oscar if Heath Wins

Heath Ledger with daughter Matilda. 

And the Oscar goes to…Matilda Ledger.

No, you didn’t miss a great supporting turn by Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams’s daughter (though no doubt the genes are in her favor for future nominations). Actually, the Associated Press–and yes, many other outlet–are reporting that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (you know, the Oscar folk) have determined that if Heath Ledger wins the Best Supporting Actor Award on Sunday night (as is widely expected), the award will become property of his daughter Matilda, although it actually will be held in trust for her by her mother until she’s 18.

Now things get complicated– 

The Academy actually has a lot of rules about who controls an Oscar, due to fears of people selling them. Recipients are required to sign a contract saying they won’t sell the Oscar without first offering it to the Academy for a dollar. However, interesting problem here–Matilda’s just three, and can’t sign. Williams can’t sign the agreement either, due to laws against parents signing agreements that force a child to do something when he/she is an adult; presumably such laws came about so parents can’t draw up agreements for infants that require the grown children to turn over all future income to their parents or things like that, rather than worries about who was handling an Oscar. In other cases where children have won the award–Tatum O’Neal at age ten and Anna Paquin at age eleven, they signed the agreement once when they were a minor, and then were to sign it again when they reached age eighteen. At least that was the plan–Academy executive director Bruce Davis admitted that he wasn’t sure offhand if the procedures were followed all the way through.

Anyway, in this case, they decided (apparently after much worry and debate) that Williams would hold the Oscar in trust for Matilda and then when she turns eighteen, she’ll decide if she wants to sign the agreement and take control of the Oscar.

I find all this fascinating (love the legal minutiae), but of course we can’t forget that this is an “If-then” scenario. While it looks like close to a mortal lock that Ledger will win Best Supporting Actor for his performance in “The Dark Knight,” sometimes weird things happen at the Oscars, and they usually happen in the always tough Supporting categories. So hang on.

The next question, then, if he does win, will be who will accept the award? The ceremony will be way past Matilda’s bedtime. Williams may feel uncomfortable accepting it considering the couple had broken up before Ledger’s death, and were never married. I’d put money on Christopher Nolan, who stepped in to do the acceptance duties for Ledger at the Golden Globes. The only other possibility would be Christian Bale; the studio could decide this would be a good time to try to repair his tarnished image, which Bale could do with a nice, laudatory speech about Ledger. No profanity, of course.