New Category Alert: The Oscar for “Best Casting” - Awards Outlook
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Awards analysis is provided by Sean from @MathTeacherMovies.
New Category Alert: The Oscar for “Best Casting”
At the heart of this year’s awards season, the Academy announced an entirely new category: Best Casting. This has been a long time coming as there has not been a new category announced since Best Animated Film more than twenty years ago. This is well deserved as this aspect of film has been a necessary part of the filmmaking process and therefore deserves to be commended.
This category won’t be introduced until the 2025 Oscars, which makes sense as casting is close to one of the first elements of film making and therefore should only be in play for films that have not started this process yet.
One of the most common reactions when this news was released was, “What about the stunt category?” which has been a category that is frequently and desperately asked for and for good reason. However, the casting directors’ branch of the Academy has been in existence for a much larger amount of time and with the stunt branch of the Academy only just now beginning to form, Best Stunts will probably be the next category announced.
This will be an almost impossible award to predict as there will be no trends to rely on, making it an interesting award to speculate about. However, through examination, there could be some negatives to this category. It could just be another opportunity for additional nominations for the Best Picture frontrunners of the Oscar race or it could be the chance for some more creative picks that will be off the beaten path. It will most likely be the former, because most of the time the movies that are frontrunners in the main Oscar race often have some of the best casting, but it will be cool to see if there could be some creative nominations that veer away from the usual awards narrative.
Another possibility is that Best Casting nominations will eclipse one of the four Best Performance Awards. For instance, just take this past year… Oppenheimer, Poor Things, or The Holdovers would have easily won the award for Best Casting as it ran parallel to a performance win. While casting a film and the performance are two separate aspects of the film, some would argue a good performance comes from proper casting.
The best way to interpret what will come of this award is the examination of how it has played out at the BAFTA awards where it has been a category since 2019. The winners of the award have been Joker, West Side Story, Elvis, and The Holdovers which were all nominated for Best Picture and received at least a nomination for a performance at the BAFTAs. Most of them also received at least one performance win, so it is likely that this will be the case when it becomes an Academy Award.
There was one year where the BAFTA gave the Best Casting Award to the film Rocks which came out of nowhere and beat out the typical Best Picture and Performance contenders of that year, but this was also during Covid which could be considered a bit of a wild card.
Some would argue that the show is already too long and another category will just pad the run time of the ceremony but those people most likely will not be tuning in for the Oscars these days anyway. Regardless of the amount of awards, it is essential that all aspects of the film process are honored and so this award, as well as all of the others, are essential.