Thursday Theoretical Oscar Category

Welcome to a weekly feature here at Movies With Abe. In my love for everything Oscar, it’s always fun to speculate on who or what might have been included given different circumstances. Though there are twenty-four fields recognized on Oscar night, that still neglects a handful of key players. As a result, I’d like to take a look each week at imagined categories, and who or what might have benefited from their existence.

The category: Best Casting

Why it should exist: The role of the casting director is a crucial one, since assembling an ensemble makes the existing Oscar acting categories possible. The Casting Society of America has a handful of separate categories for productions of different financial and thematic natures. Enough people believe that this category is worthwhile that it’s been suggested three times in the past fifteen years, last rejected in 2011.

Why it doesn’t exist: The Academy’s justification was that it was too hard to determine who did the casting in a movie (the director, for instance, might also have been involved), and that there shouldn’t be any new categories (an irrelevant objection for our purposes). Most importantly, average viewers aren’t particularly interested in hearing speeches from other faces they don’t recognize.

Who might have been nominated the past five years:
2011: The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Margin Call, Moneyball
2010: The Fighter, The King’s Speech, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, The Town
2009: Inglourious Basterds, The Hurt Locker, Nine, Sherlock Holmes, Up in the Air
2008: The Dark Knight, Doubt, Milk, Revolutionary Road, Star Trek
2007: Hairspray, Into the Wild, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men

Who do you think might have been nominated?