I'm pleased to announce that everything extraordinary you're heard, read, speculated and prayed for regarding The Dark Knight is absolutely true. This isn't only the greatest comic book movie ever, and one of the top-10 or so action flicks, it's the Academy Awards' ticket to engaging a moviegoing public believing the Oscars don't speak for their tastes, and caring less about the show each year.

That's right. I'm guessing The Dark Knight will be a best picture finalist next spring. And academy voters don't need to worry about compromising their high-falutin' standards. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan crafted a ruthless epic of adrenaline -- which the academy typically stashes in technical categories -- and labyrinthine morality and ethics no less complex and compelling as The Departed and No Country for Old Men. The Dark Knight deserves mention in such Oscar-winning company.

A more mature take on a pop culture fantasy is impossible, unless you get bogged down in the hero's psychology, as Nolan did in Batman Begins. Now that the origins stuff is handled (again), The Dark Knight begins with a diabolically timed bank heist, popping the seal on a 24-pack of whoopass to come. The action is mostly hand-to-hand (or club or whatever's handy), except for a few vehicular assaults that are obviously old-school destruction, not that CG stuff.

Characters who are familiar now get right down to business: Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) with his Hamlet angst, divided between his bruising alter ego, a romance blocked by a worthy rival (with a delicious subtext possibly making its completion the end of the Caped Crusader), and empty starlet-hopping to keep up appearances.

Meanwhile, a maze of money laundering crooks, corrupt law officials and Gotham Cityites who aren't sure if Batman's needed anymore create opportunities for cold-blooded double crosses, copycat Batmen, a cameo by an old Bat-nemesis and a few more of those wonderful toys.

And I haven't even gotten to the best part.

The Joker is, indeed, wild in The Dark Knight, embodied by a truly terrifying performance by the late Heath Ledger. A self-described "agent of chaos," this Joker is a supersonic psycho making Javier Bardem's killer in No Country for Old Men seem like a rational kind of guy. Ledger goes all the way with catastrophic malevolence,  with none of the clownish aspects Jack Nicholson previously brought to the role.

His jokes -- like a disappearing pencil trick you won't believe and won't want to try -- are deadly serious.

"Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger," Joker says early on. Ledger's death in January of an accidental prescription drug overdose makes his delivery of lines like that even eerier. But not in an exploitative way. His demise informs the role of a criminal with no regard for anyone's life, especially his own. Ledger's death simply makes the Joker stranger.

I fully expect him to get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this, and it won't be a sympathy thing. Along with Bardem's Chigurh, Robert De Niro's Max Cady and Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, we now have one helluva Mount Rushmore of mayhem.