Among the many controversies of this year's Oscars race, some believe that favourites to take home the acting awards have been recognised in the wrong category.

This year's race to the Oscars has been shockingly chaotic and vitriolic, with one actor's history of bigoted social media posts and two directors' use of AI being revealed, and plenty of gossip about who is behind all this revealing. Another contentious topic has been "category fraud" – that is, the phenomenon of actors being nominated in categories where many believe they don't really belong. "Absolute category fraud" said one X user, of Kieran Culkin's best supporting actor nod for A Real Pain. "It's time to stop the category fraud madness," said another, referring to both Culkin and Zoe Saldaña's supporting actress nomination for Emilia Pérez. And there are many more posts like these. Kyle Wilson said in a piece for The Ringer in November that this was poised to be "the fraudiest awards season in Oscar history".

Still, we shouldn't get carried away. No one is accusing anyone else of committing actual fraud. The practice they're talking about is simply a long-established way of boosting actors' chances of winning an Academy Award (or a Bafta or a Golden Globe), by placing one co-lead in a lead acting category and the other into the supporting, rather than have them compete against each other. Nate Jones in Vulture has called it an "understandable bit of gamesmanship". But Michael Schulman, the author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears, tells the BBC that "category fraud is particularly egregious this year".

The films being criticised are the aforementioned Emilia Pérez and A Real Pain, plus Wicked, all of which are on the shortlist for Best picture. All three films are dominated by pairs of actors of the same gender who have almost equal amounts to do, rather than playing lead roles and supporting roles. For instance, when Wicked was a Broadway show, the actresses playing Elphaba and Galinda, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, were both nominated for the Tony award for Best actress in a musical, so it would seem logical that the actresses playing Elphaba and Galinda in the big-screen adaptation, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, should both be in the running for best actress prizes. But that's not what has happened. At the Oscars and the Baftas, Erivo has been nominated as a lead actress, and Grande as a supporting actress.

Some say the categories occupied by the two stars of Emilia Pérez are even more questionable. The film divides its time between characters played by Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón – and according to Matthew Stewart, who has crunched the numbers for Screen Time Central, Saldaña is on screen and/or on the soundtrack for 57 minutes and 50 seconds, or 43.69% of the film, which is slightly more than Gascón's 52 minutes and 21 seconds, or 39.54%. And yet it is Gascón who has been nominated for a lead actress Oscar and Bafta, and Saldaña who is on the "supporting" shortlist.

But the alleged "category fraud" that is really getting film journalists and social-media commentators hot under the collar pertains to Culkin in A Real Pain. Stewart has calculated that the film's writer/director, Jesse Eisenberg has more screen time (62 minutes and 29 seconds) than Culkin does (58 minutes and six seconds), but the film is obviously about the relationship between two cousins who are almost always on screen together. They are as much co-leads as Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were in Thelma & Louise – and yet while Davis and Sarandon were both shortlisted for best actress Oscars in 1992, Culkin has been nominated as best supporting actor at the Oscars and the Baftas alike. Last year, Culkin took home the Golden Globe for Best performance by a male actor in a television series – drama for his portrayal of Succession's Roman Roy – he was up against his onscreen brother Jeremy Strong in the same category.

"There are no official rules delineating a lead versus........

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