Sobering up on Ledger

In all the posthumous swooning over Ledger, I read repeatedly how his death, too, was "accidental." But the medical examiner's toxicology report listed a bucket of addictive, mood-altering substances in his body, from antihistamines to Xanax. None of them got there by accident.

After Ledger died in January, one distraught fan posted on the Internet that he "will go down alongside James Dean and River Phoenix as great talents who were so cruelly taken away just as they started to show how damn good they were!" But these guys weren't "taken away." Phoenix OD'd on cocaine and heroin. Dean died in a car crash after a short, fast life of drugs and alcohol. They took themselves away. It's a simple thing to find help for drug and alcohol abuse these days. Millions have done it, including me, and though not easy, it represents the only way to live with the integrity we owe ourselves, our families and the world around us.

Last year, I visited the hamlet in Wales through which poet Dylan Thomas caroused. At an inn from which he was evicted (for stealing beer), I learned that down the street lived an old lady who had known him. Go knock on her door, I was urged. So I did. Gladys didn't hear so well, but when I finally conveyed the idea that I was curious about Dylan Thomas, she laughed and said, "Well, he was just a common drunk, wasn't he?"

I could say the same of Ledger.

Film critic Ty Burr, trying to untangle this heady mix of big box office and public mourning, wrote, "This is less about hype than about the gentle madness of crowds." Nothing gentle about it: Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around.