Academy Creating Casting Category

Someone at ABC will have had a heart attack and died upon reading this news.

BAFTA have done a pretty good job with their Casting category, so I hope the Oscars follow their suit.

To be fair, I loved Joker's ensemble casting. You had some great grizzled faces in it with Whigham, Camp and Fleshler, among others.

But yeah, I feel like the criteria of this is going to very interesting, as it can easily be taken advantage of. Also, at what point can the casting director take credit for roles as opposed to directors pursuing actors, or actors pursuing projects and bringing them to fruition?

going back to the director's role, another consideration is when directors work with the same or nearly-same slate of actors across multiple projects, like Mike Leigh (who's working on something rn). How much is a casting director responsible for Leigh's style of improvising with a close group of artistic collaborators?

As am I, but I don't want this to essentially be boiled down to "most casting" like Best Editing/Sound usually defers to "most editing/sound." Which I am positive it will.

But see, that's the thing for me: I also thought Joker's bit parts were well-cast but I can say the same thing about many, many, many other movies. How does one such achievement gets put above another?

Unless this award goes the way of "most star-studded ensemble of a BP contender", I can see it prioritizing recognition of films like West Side Story or Killers of the Flower Moon where you have expansive casts filled with not especially well-known but very memorable actors who must've been a bitch for the casting people to find, like all the young singing'n'dancing performers in WSS or the Native American performers (plus the rest of the townsfolk) in KOTFM. If that were the category's main idea, I'd be on board with that.

That’s just a flaw in the taste of the Academy though. Not really any reason to not want this category to exist.