How the New Oscars Category Benefits Women

There’s big news from the Academy, but everyone seems to be missing the real story.

For the first time in 20 years, the Oscars will be adding a new category.  Beginning in 2026, the Academy will honor the Best Casting of a film. If you talk to Oscarphiles, it’s a change that has been many years in the making. Along with Best Stunt, it’s the category most requested as an addition. In many ways, it’s a natural fit. The Academy already has a branch of casting directors. In fact, it’s the only branch that didn’t have a corresponding award. Further, casting is a skill that general audiences are deeply invested in. Who among us hasn’t quibbled with a casting choice or dream-casted a remake of one of our favorite films? Whether we actually understand casting or not, we think we do, and for the purposes of the Oscars, which is fueled largely by controversy, that’s all that matters.

Speculation has already begun on how this will exactly play out. Will Best Casting be composed entirely of Best Picture nominees? Will it favor big ensembles like Oppenheimer, or films in which the casting directors make a major discovery, like Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers? Maybe it will become a place to recognize ensembles made of largely non-White actors, who due to the entrenched patterns of racism in Hollywood, almost always include lots of unknowns. In that case, Killers of the Flower Moon, American Fiction, or The Color Purple might have made the cut this year. (Note: I’m not too keen on this approach, as it reduces marginalized groups to, well, groups, and reduces the chance of those actors being recognized in the Lead or Supporting categories, where their careers would get a real boost from the individual recognition.)

What the Oscarphiles and awards pundits seem to be missing, however, is that this could be a phenomenal development for women in film. Most Academy branches skew male. The Greta Gerwig “snub” in Best Director, for example, was blamed at least in part on that branch’s overwhelming testosterone. There is, however, one branch that leans female. You guessed it: The casting director’s branch. We don’t know the exact numbers—AMPAS doesn’t make them available to journalists—but according to a survey by Woman and Hollywood, 83.4 percent of the top 300 films from 2016 to 2018 had a woman casting director. It’s possible that the Academy has let in a slightly higher proportion of male to female casting directors—given what we know about the Academy’s history, I’d call it likely—but it would have to have been an enormous bias for the branch not to skew heavily towards women, especially with the Academy’s focus in recent years on creating more gender diversity in the overall membership.

Since branch members do the nominating (and the entire membership votes on the winners), Best Casting should be a place where women-led and women-directed films get more recognition. Casting directors are professionals, but they’re also people, and it seems far more likely they would recognize a film like Barbie than the male-dominated director’s branch. They might also make room for Past Lives, which has a female lead but is also a three-hander with no major stars that relies heavily on the actors’ chemistry. 

In my dream world, this would also be a place where Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret could get some love. The Judy Blume adaptation from writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig uncovered a young talent in lead Abby Ryder Fortson, as well as a full roster of young unknowns to play her friends, enemies, and romantic partners. Honestly, movies centered around children should always get a look in this category, as casting youngsters is an enormous challenge. They are almost always unknowns and have less acting training to rely on, so the instincts of the casting director are crucial.  Throw in the fact that Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie are immaculately cast as the youngish, mixed-religion parents dealing with their own life stresses, and Are You There God definitely would merit a spot.

Am I dreaming too big to suggest other woman-directed films like Showing Up, Rye Lane, The Royal Hotel, or You Hurt My Feelings might have shown up in this category? Probably, as none of them had anything resembling Oscar buzz. But the addition of Best Casting provides a real opportunity to swing the balance back towards women at the Oscars. If a film can make a play for that Best Casting, it has to campaign. If it campaigns, voters might fall in love with it and honor it elsewhere. The Best Casting award won’t change the Oscars overnight. All it does is nudge the door open a little more, but that’s how progress happens.