The 98th Academy Awards, to be held on March 15th next year, will introduce a new award: Best Achievement in Casting. This is the first new Oscar award in 25 years since the Best Animated Feature award was established in 2001, making it a highly anticipated addition.
However, precisely because it's a completely new award, there are almost no past precedents to follow. How will the judges choose? How will the candidates promote themselves? How will the media predict the results? These are all largely unknowns.
The Best Casting award is a new category added to the Oscars for the first time in 25 years.
According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the nominees for Best Casting are selected by a vote of approximately 160 members of the Academy's Casting Directors Division. The initial shortlist includes ten films. The Academy then invites these ten casting directors to give a personal statement on camera, accompanied by film clips, which are edited into a short video and submitted to the aforementioned 160 members for further evaluation. From this shortlist, half are chosen to select five official nominees. In the final voting round, all Academy members who have seen the five nominated films are eligible to vote, thus determining the winner of the Best Casting Award.
However, compared to other technical awards, what exactly constitutes "best casting" is a question that even the Oscar judges themselves, let alone ordinary people, probably don't fully understand. When it comes to selecting Best Original Score and Best Song, you can listen to the melody and judge the singing; when it comes to Best Costume Design, Makeup, or Art Direction, there are concrete criteria presented to everyone. Even the upcoming Best Action Choreography award is straightforward to evaluate. But what about casting?
As the name suggests, casting is the process of selecting actors. The casting director, following the director's instructions and their own understanding of the script, chooses suitable actors for each role. However, the entire actor selection process is difficult to visualize. Furthermore, often the final casting of main roles is not something a small casting director can decide. In some cases, even the director may not have the final say. Looking back at Hollywood history, there are countless examples of producers or film company owners forcing directors to cast certain individuals in leading roles in specific films. In such situations, what role can the casting director play?
Of course, there are also readily available awards to refer to, such as the Casting Directors Guild Awards, which have been held since 1985. This guild currently has about 1,200 members, all of whom are professionals in the field. The results selected by these insiders should be relatively more convincing and can serve as a reference for Oscar voters unfamiliar with the industry, as well as the general public.
However, the problem is that the Casting Directors Guild Awards have become quite complex over time. They are not only divided into four categories: film, television, drama, and advertising, but also further subdivided into seven or eight awards, including Best Casting for Animated Voice Acting, Best Casting for a Big-Budget Comedy, Best Casting for a Big-Budget Drama, Best Casting for an Independent Comedy, Best Casting for an Independent Drama, Best Casting for a Low-Budget Film, Best Casting for a Micro-Budget Film, and Best Casting for an International Film.
Films such as "Wicked" won the previous year's Casting Directors Guild Award.
This inevitably introduces more bias. Take last year's 40th Casting Directors Guild Awards as an example: films like *Wicked*, *The Nameless*, *My Old Buddy*, *The Secret Meeting*, *Emilia Perez*, and *Wilderness Robot* won major awards. If we include the nominated films, the number reaches dozens, encompassing almost all the awards season's hottest films, making its reference value rather limited.
"Anora" won the Best Casting Director award at the previous British Academy Film Awards.
Another point of reference is the British Academy Film Awards' Best Casting Director award, established in 2020. Previous winners included films such as *Joker*, *Rocks*, *West Side Story*, *Elvis Presley*, *The School for the Dead*, and *Anora*. Reflecting on the casts of these films might deepen our understanding of the importance of casting directing.
