The Oscars' Missing Category: Best Casting

And the Oscar goes to… no one. But why?

When Hollywood gets together, either in person or via Zoom, for the 93rd Academy Awards, it will be a moment for the film industry to celebrate the work they've done over the past year and beyond during a period of immense strife. Champagne will be drunk, teary speeches will be given, and the various aspects of filmmaking, including many oft-overlooked departments, will receive some much-earned recognition. That is, except for some notable omissions. Actors will win awards, but the people who put them on screen in the first place won't.

For decades, the job of casting has been one of the most overlooked and easily misunderstood aspects of entertainment, from film to TV to theater to video games and beyond. Yet none of those things work without it. Every time you see a person on stage or screen (or hear them in a radio drama or play them in a game), someone had to cast them. From the central ensemble to the background extras to the voices on the phone, all of those actors were hand-picked by a casting team, and that process is one of the toughest and most widely dismissed parts of the industry.

It’s hard to look at the face of modern entertainment in all its forms and not consider the indelible role that casting plays in shaping that. Consider the work of Sarah Halley Finn, the woman who is largely responsible for filling out the cast of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thus helping to define the blockbuster of the 21st century, or Nina Gold, the woman behind the multi-award-winning ensembles of beloved shows like Game of Thrones, The Crown, and Chernobyl, not to forget the most recent Star Wars trilogy and no fewer than six Oscar-winning films.

Finn told the Washington Post that she's cast more than a thousand roles overall for Marvel, from Avengers to background dancers to voices in Tony Stark's ear. Consider the risks made by Finn and her team in casting Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man at a time when he was considered unemployable by much of Hollywood, or in hiring an unknown Australian soap star as Thor. Not only did Finn have to anticipate whether these actors would be right for a role that could unfold over several movies, but she had to consider harmony between individuals who would not necessarily appear on screen together for years, interactions that fans were clamoring for thanks to their vast knowledge of the characters’ lore. How different would the MCU Spider-Man movies be if Finn and her team hadn’t anticipated that crackling chemistry between Downey Jr. and Tom Holland, putting the young Brit forward for consideration by the filmmaking team as the latest Peter Parker. For many fans of George R.R. Martin’s expansive saga, casting appropriate actors seemed like an impossible task, yet previously unknown players like Gwendoline Christie, Sophie Turner, and Jack Gleeson, to name but three, ended up being perfect choices. Our entire concept of a pop-culture hero has been remolded for a new generation by the behind-the-scenes work of people like Finn and Gold.

Of course, the director and producer are also part of the casting process, particularly on huge projects like the MCU or the like. And that only feeds into the problem for casting in that it’s something of an invisible art. As Debbie McWilliams, who cast the recent Bond films, told the Guardian last year, "If you notice the casting of a film, we haven’t done a good job." But what goes into the art of casting?

The problem for casting [is] that it's something of an invisible art.

"In the same way that production designers and costume designers use their skills, creativity and discernment to bring a selection of options to the director—who then signs off on the final choices—casting directors amass a library of talent through the thousands of hours of auditions they direct, plays and showcases they attend, and films and TV shows they watch,” Lana Veenker tells IGN. She’s the founder of Cast Iron Studios, which has worked on the casting of projects like American Vandal, Grimm, and Twilight. “The tremendous amount of labor this entails results in a keen eye that allows them to hone in on exactly the right actors for the part, elicit powerful performances in the audition room, and present a tight selection of the most compelling choices to the final decision-makers. When it comes to the cast, they are a production’s best resource, advocates, and guardian angels."

Old school stories of casting center on fairytale-esque moments of discovery, like the now-legendary tale of Lana Turner being found while drinking a malt at Schwab's Pharmacy or a talent agent spotting Charlize Theron while she pleaded for help from a bank teller over an expired check. Nowadays, talent can be found everywhere and it’s up to the casting teams to do just that. It’s their job to know about all of those people, to figure out their capabilities, and to foresee the ultimate fate of a project should they cast one person over another.

Rich Mento is an award-winning casting director as well as the co-president of the Casting Society of America. He's worked on the likes of the Step Up franchise, Blumhouse series like 12 Deadly Days, and even the Halo games. He says that casting can have a seismic impact on a production.

“If I get to the end of a process of a particular character and there's a couple of choices, all of whom would make great versions of that film, then I'm happy I've done my job,” Mento tells IGN. “And then I turn it over to the director and the producer in the studio and whomever and say, now, who do you guys want to make it with? You can make it with any of these, let's say, three actors. Any of these three actors can play that role. It'll be very different films. Which is the film that you want to make and why? And let's talk about that.”

Casting is a rarity in that it’s one of the few areas of the entertainment business primarily run by women. According to statistics from Women and Hollywood, of the top 300 films from 2016 to 2018, 83.4% of those positions were filled with women. This is partly because the early work of casting after the fall of the studio system was seen more as administrative than creative, and those jobs typically fell upon the shoulders of the women working as secretaries or assistants. Brian Herrera, a professor at Princeton who is writing a book on the history of casting, told the Guardian that casting is "a category of labour that remains largely unacknowledged, underpaid and under-resourced," and that many directors still talk about their casting director “as they might talk about their housekeeper.”

As these roles transitioned away from managerial work to a tangible part of the filmmaking process, those women stayed around and helped to train the next generation of casting teams, often discovering other women and sharing their skills while nurturing talent beyond the boundaries of the old star system. As one casting director explained, some actors feel safer with women in the casting role.

“There’s also high level of vulnerability and trust involved in the audition process, and a power differential between actors and gatekeepers that certain industry players have taken advantage of in the past, as the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have shown,” says this person.

It's thanks to women like Marion Dougherty that casting has taken the professional shape it has. Dougherty started work in the 1940s as an assistant to the casting department of the Kraft Television Theatre series. During her time on TV, she gave the likes of Dustin Hoffman and James Dean their first acting credits before moving to film. Her name can be found on films like Batman, Grease, and Braveheart. She also worked on movies like Midnight Cowboy but never received a credit for them. For a long time, casting wasn't seen as a real job that required a proper title or industry-wide acknowledgment. Some filmmakers even take umbrage to casting directors being given the title of “director”. In the documentary Casting By, which celebrated the work of Dougherty, Ray director Taylor Hackford said, "The reality is you’re not a director. And we take exception to being called a director. You’re a casting person, ‘casting by,’ but I do not call them directors, because they’re not."

The Academy still lags behind when it comes to acknowledging the work of casting directors. There’s no Oscar for the category and only one casting director has ever taken home an honorary award: Lynn Stalmaster, who worked on films as varied as Fiddler on the Roof, Deliverance, and Superman. Despite multiple campaigns and the support of beloved figures like Martin Scorsese, who said that "casting is 85 to 90 percent of the picture for me," the Academy is slow to change. It took until 2020 for the BAFTAs to introduce a Best Casting award, a decision that was widely welcomed by the film community.

As Mento notes, casting is a “collaborative job,” one mostly comprised of labor that is complete before shooting starts, making it all too easy for others to overlook or underplay the work involved. "I am generally finished by the time the cameras start rolling,” he says. “And for every other department, that's more or less when they start. And then we're off to our next job. Casting is the race to get you to the starting line of the actual race. We bring people to the starting line and then we say, okay, have a good race!"

It’s less a question of if the Oscars will acknowledge casting, but when, says Mento.

“I think the surge of popular support is in our favor,” he predicts. “Change takes time but we’ll get there.”

2020 was a year where we saw the importance of casting on full display. Consider works like Birds of Prey, Promising Young Woman, and Minari, all of which used their sublimely chosen casts to perfection, elevating the story in crucial ways. Surely the work of the likes of Sarah Halley Finn, Nina Gold, and the vast field of casting directors deserves recognition on Hollywood’s biggest night of the year?

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