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The 50-year struggle to get Best Casting into the Oscars

It’s one of the few female-dominated niches in Hollywood. They finally made it to the Academy Awards.

On Sunday night, the Academy Awards will confer their first trophy to a casting director. The award for Best Casting is the first new category to be added to the Oscars in 24 years — and it’s doing its part to remedy the Oscars’s abysmal record on gender.

Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, 82.2 percent of winners have been men, with women making up just 17.8 percent. Time hasn’t helped even the split out as much as you might think. Of this year’s nominated class, 67 percent are men and 33 percent are women. Unbelievably, this is the highest proportion of female nominees on record, matching the high-water mark established in 2021.

Adding casting to the Oscars almost certainly means adding female nominees. “About 75 percent of casting directors are women,” says Lana Veenker, president of the International Casting Directors Association. This year, four of the five nominees for Best Casting are women.

As is so often the case with women’s work, casting is often invisible labor. It tends to happen well before the rest of the film-making process, behind closed doors. It’s for that reason, advocates say, that it’s taken so long to get a casting-specific Oscar.

“By its nature, casting needs to be confidential,” says Destiny Lilly, president of the Casting Society of America. “So a lot of people who are in other disciplines don’t really see how the casting process happens.”

“We’ve been the only heads of department that didn’t have an Oscar category for years,” Veenker says.

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The new Oscar has been a long time coming. The CSA was first founded in 1982 with the goal “to work to make a casting Oscar a reality,” Lilly syas.

Casting directors started being admitted to the Academy as nonvoting members around the same time. In 1996, the Academy rejected a motion to create a specific casting director branch, and went on to reject similar motions twice more until 2013, when the casting branch finally came to fruition.

“The governors of that casting branch really were the ones who were instrumental in making the Oscar a reality,” Lilly says.

They would have a powerful ally in David Rubin, a veteran casting director who was elected president of the Academy in 2019. “He helped lay a lot of the groundwork,” Veenker says. “From what I know, it was a long process, involving a lot of heartbreak over many years.”

The hope is that the new award will help spotlight and celebrate the specific skillset that casting directors bring to the table.

“The best casting feels invisible. It’s when you can’t imagine anyone else playing those roles.”

“What casting directors are doing is going to theater, they’re going to showcases, they’re watching little indie films that are appearing in festivals that aren’t on people’s radars,” Veenker says.

She points to the work of the casting director Nancy Bishop, who worked on 2020’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. “When they needed someone to play Sasha Baron Cohen’s daughter, she had to find an Eastern European actress who could believably pull off everything that he needed her to do in the film,” Veenker says. “The actress that she found [Maria Bakalova] was someone that she had seen in an indie film at a Carlo Vivari film festival in the Czech Republic, who was also somebody that a colleague of hers knew who had just recently come out of theater school in Bulgaria. A casting director is going to be able to know about that.”

But casting directors don’t just discover new talent; they also find ways to make audiences see familiar figures in a new light. Lilly points to Best Supporting Actress frontrunner Amy Madigan in Weapons. Madigan is best known for roles like the supportive, despairing wife in Field of Dreams, but in Weapons, she transforms herself to bone-chilling effect. “People know her work very well,” Lilly says, “but seeing her do something completely different in that way can be really exciting.”

When casting is done really well, Lilly and Veenker agree, audiences won’t notice it at all.

“It’s the kind of art that people really notice when they think it’s not good, but is almost invisible when it is good,” Lilly says.

“The best casting feels invisible,” Veenker says. “It’s when you can’t imagine anyone else playing those roles. It just all works together, like a big puzzle that fits together perfectly.”

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