Oh, Hannibal, you big, lovable teddy bear, you. Come give us a hug!

Yes, we Americans do love our movie villains. And the nastier the better.

You wouldn't think that in a time of terrorism and uncertainty we'd cozy up to characters that represent the worst in human nature. But just look at all the bad guys who in recent years have gone home with an Oscar:

Forest Whitaker as dictator/cannibal Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." Sean Penn as a Boston mobster in "Mystic River." Denzel Washington as a corrupt cop in "Training Day."

And at this year's Oscars alone: Tilda Swinton as an ethics-challenged lawyer in "Michael Clayton," Daniel Day-Lewis as a murderous misanthrope in "There Will Be Blood" and Javier Bardem as a remorseless killing machine in "No Country for Old Men."

And now we have the late Heath Ledger and his maniacal turn as the Joker in the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight."

"Mad-crazy brilliant," Rolling Stone wrote. "He's out-villained Hannibal Lecter," raved Gary Oldman, who plays Lt. Jim Gordon in the film.

Ledger's performance is amazing, making the Joker a crazed nihilist whose only motivation is to spread anarchy. The actor not only got lost behind the makeup — white face, smeared lipstick, raccoonish eyeliner — but he got lost in the character. It's hard to imagine that this is the same young man who played the conflicted, gay ranch hand in "Brokeback Mountain."

Fifty years ago these characterizations of villains in film not only wouldn't have been honored, but they also wouldn't have made it to the screen.

For the first 40 years of the Oscars, the statuette almost never went to a villain. There were a couple of exceptions, like Fredric March's win for 1931's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (although for half of his screen time he was playing a good guy). But the American ethos in the first half of the 20th century was firmly rooted in 19th-century ideas of heroism. That's what we aspired to, and that's what we honored with our awards.

And then Oscar began changing.

Critic, author and TV personality Leonard Maltin thinks the shift may have begun in the 1950s with Marlon Brando and James Dean.

"That was the flowering of the antihero, the young rebel," he said. "The traditional hero seemed too one-dimensional for the times. The antihero was still our hero, but he was recognizably human, with flaws and attitude. Then the '60s and the counterculture arrived, and the traditional hero was unseated. We found ourselves rooting for Bonnie and Clyde."

Something like that happened in the 1930s, when America's shift from a rural to an urban society resulted in a fascination with the gangster film. But back then, Oscars weren't given to actors for playing crooks.

"For the first half of the last century, movies saw everything in black and white," said Lynn Bartholome, president of the Popular Culture Association. "A female character was either a goody-two-shoes or an evil woman. Cowboys wore white hats or black hats. Film noir rarely offered characters who occupied a middle ground — you were either all good or all bad."

By the early 1970s, though, America had been through a Cold War, a shooting war in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle and the rise of youth culture. Black and white was morphing into gray.

When 1972's "The Godfather" won multiple Oscars, including one for Marlon Brando's depiction of mob master Vito Corleone (two years later, Robert De Niro won an Oscar for playing the same character as a young man in "The Godfather Part II"), it broke a tradition of giving the industry's highest honor to virtuous characters.

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, notes that the novel "The Godfather" came out in 1969 — the same year moviegoers flocked to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Wild Bunch" and "Midnight Cowboy." In these films thieves, killers and hustlers were the protagonists.

"Before this, Hollywood was defined by and had a sense of cultural obligation that the good guys would win in the end," Thompson said. "But by the early '70s, we were seeing a complete unraveling and restructuring of cultural expectations. All of a sudden you had audiences identifying with bad guys."

Humans have always been fascinated by the dark side of human nature, Thompson said. "Most of Shakespeare's great characters are real rogues, even cads. There's a vibrancy that comes out of a flawed character. It's actually easier to identify with those guys. Perfection isn't all that interesting ... or that much fun for an actor to play."

Kansas City native and Oscar-winner Chris Cooper, who early in his career specialized in playing decent Everymen, in recent years has landed several villainous roles, including a corrupt CIA spymaster in "The Bourne Identity" and the plum part of real-life FBI traitor Robert Hanssen in "Breach."

"Playing a villain ... it really frees an actor up," Cooper said in a phone call from his home outside Boston. "Playing a virtuous person is a bit of a tightrope routine. It may not look hard, but an actor has to toe the line. You're trying to please the audience's idea of a hero.

"A villain, though, is full of possibilities. The biggest problem I had with playing Robert Hanssen, having talked to his colleagues, was to make a really boring guy interesting."

In recent years the public's fascination with evil has become obsessive. Documentaries about real-life serial killers inundate cable channels. "Dexter," Showtime's series about a serial killer who works for the police, last season made the jump to a major TV network (CBS).

You can thank Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning portrayal of cannibal/serial killer Hannibal Lecter in 1991's "The Silence of the Lambs," Bartholome said.

"After Hannibal, we began to look at the dark side and started to see that maybe there's a goodness in the bad guy. We know Hannibal is a horrible being, but he attracts us, and in some ways we even feel sympathy for him. There's humanity even in bad guys. Maybe there's an explanation for his badness."

What sets Ledger's Joker apart is that he represents pure evil and malevolence. He may have a history, but every time he talks about his past, he changes the story. His goal is not money or fame or women or power. He simply wants to destroy everything, and he's not dissuaded by fear, threats or reason.

Not everyone enjoys the Joker's almost elemental villainy.

"I just found him too sick and twisted," Maltin said. "I admire Ledger's performance, but I derive no pleasure from it. I found it hard to enjoy watching the antics of a terrorist in a post-9/11 world. I realize that the film is making a statement about all of that, but the truth is that I wasn't having much fun watching it."