Beyond the usual glitz, glam and teary-eyed speeches of the Oscars, the 98th Academy Awards this Sunday will have something new: a prize for best casting.
It’s the first new category to come to the award show in a quarter-century — the last one was best animated feature film in 2001.
The prize goes to a film’s casting director, meant to recognize them for bringing together the people who make a story come to life.
The casting directors up for the award this year are behind some of the films that have had the most buzz all award season. Nina Gold is nominated for Hamnet, Jennifer Venditti for Marty Supreme, Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle After Another, Gabriel Domingues for The Secret Agent and Francine Maisler for Sinners.
While movies have always needed the casting directors to fit real actors into a director’s vision, they haven’t always credited them for their work. And though it’s still not clear what kind of casting choices the academy might honour, casting directors like Erica A. Hart say they’re just glad the profession is finally getting its moment.
“It’s huge,” said Hart, a member of the Casting Society’s board of directors. “It’s long overdue. Ninety-eight years of Oscars, and here we are … but better late than never.”
Ryan Coogler’s southern gothic vampire thriller Sinners has set a new record with 16 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actor.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another was close behind with 13 nods.
Casting directors’ quest for credit
The first time a casting director got credit on a film was in 1968, when legendary casting director Lynn Stalmaster — who later got an honorary Academy Award for his casting work in 2016 — got his own film credit on The Thomas Crown Affair.
Despite that initial credit in 1968, Canadian Deirdre Bowen, who cast many well-known projects from A History of Violence to Kim’s Convenience, said it remained the exception rather than the rule for many years.
“There was a time when the big fight that casting directors had was to get credit,” Bowen said. “Now it’s just a given.”
She says the push for casting directors to regularly have their name on a film didn’t coalesce until about the 90s. Since then, other award shows have added categories for casting — the Canadian Screen Awards have had it for film since 2021, and for TV since 2013 (carried over from the former Gemini Awards, which had the category even longer).
Hart says some in the industry have long seen the casting director as a clerical role — simply “pushing paper” — because the final decision rests with the director.
“Some of the people up above don’t see us as a craft, let alone a craft that is [deserving] of the Oscar.”
Bowen says it’s much more than that. Her job is to present the director with actors who could play each character, and help them understand how the choice they make will “shape what the story becomes,” Bowen said.
For Hart, she sees herself as a “detective” of the entertainment industry. She has to go to festivals and showcases and consume as much media as humanly possible to find new talent, or think outside the box and place people in roles that might not be obvious.
“We have, you know, all of these clues, which I see as the [character] breakdowns, and our job is to solve the crime, A.K.A cast the film,” Hart said.
This year, seeing the nominated casting directors speak at panels and go on pre-Oscars press tours makes Hart feel like her profession is finally being recognized.
“I think it’s a great time to have a magnifying glass on the profession and hopefully more people will understand what we do.”
How will it be judged?
While the 2026 Oscars rulebook has written definitions for “casting” and the voting process, how the voting members will interpret the award is still up in the air.
Members of the academy’s casting branch voted to create a shortlist of 10 movies with great casting from the eligible films. From there, the 10 advanced to a “bake-off.”
Casting directors submitted supplementary material, including written statements and a five-minute highlight reel. After watching the films, reviewing the submissions and hearing a Q+A with the shortlisted casting directors, members of the casting branch narrowed it down to the five official nominees.
From there, the final decision has been in the hands of the academy’s voting members.
And it’s not clear who will win. While Sinners has won and been nominated for best ensemble or casting prizes at other shows this award season, unconventional casting choices for other films have also received much praise, like the child actors in Hamnet and unknown talent in The Secret Agent and Marty Supreme.
As a voting member of the academy, Bowen cast one of the thousands of ballets that will help decide who takes home the trophy.
For her, she tried to focus on the supporting roles’ casting rather than the stars when making her decision — like how the side characters in Sinners “told the story through their faces,” or how casting someone well-known like Kevin O’Leary in Marty Supreme worked because of his public persona.
In all, it comes down to the cast having an intangible secret sauce, said Bowen: “It just has to work.”
Still, knowing the world of casting didn’t make submitting her ballot any easier.
“It was so difficult. I literally was going over and over and over,” Bowen said.
Katey Rich, awards editor for The Ankler, a Substack publication, says the inaugural prize is widely expected to go to Sinners, “partly because of that ensemble thing,” she said.
“You know, you get everyone in the barn together. You see everyone interact,” Rich says, referring to the back half of the film, where much of the cast is together in one place as the movie’s pivotal events unfold.
For Bowen, the Canadian casting director, all bets are off on who might win. But she says whoever takes home the golden statuette will be worthy of it.
“Any one of those people are great casting directors and deserve it.”
