It’s Oscars season, and, for cinephiles, that means it’s the one time they can yell at their TVs as if they are sports fans angry with the referees, and nothing makes the outcry louder than when it feels like categories are being gamed. The best performance of the year seems like it’s going to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, only to lose to what should really be considered a lead performance.
Category fraud is the go-to phrase here — where studios push actors into specific categories that don’t seem to match the magnitude of their performances. Whether or not category fraud is a phenomenon, it sure feels real. Modern Oscars have evolved beyond performances and now include gamesmanship and campaigning alongside performance. I don’t think the biggest issue with the Oscars is accuracy and objectivity; rather, it is the award show's credibility and the fairness of the competition.
My biggest complaint is that when performances are in that grey area between leading and supporting and are nominated in supporting races, they don’t just win, they also take up a nomination spot from other actors and actresses. If the Oscars allow these performances in whichever category the studio submits them, the awards lose their impact in defining the careers of the winners. An Oscar win might come with an asterisk if the backlash is loud enough.
Last year, Kieran Culkin’s performance in A Real Pain won the Best Supporting Actor award, with a staggering 64.88% of the film’s runtime featuring Culkin according to Screen Time Central. The same year, Zoe Saldaña’s performance in Emilia Pérez was awarded Best Supporting Actress, with Saldaña commanding the screen in 43.69% of the film’s runtime. Culkin, shockingly, had more screen time than the Best Actor award winner, Adrien Brody, in The Brutalist, who appeared in only 59.83% of the film. The supporting actor award is 87 years old and, historically, accounts for 20 to 30% of a film’s screen time. Culkin’s presence in the film isn’t just high, it’s astronomical by supporting-category standards.
If Culkin and Saldaña’s wins were so egregiously stretching the bounds of supporting performances, you would expect there to be a steady increase over time in the screen time for supporting performance winners. On the contrary, the supporting categories have remained steady for decades.
Additionally, looking ahead to next year, the betting favorites for the supporting acting categories, Stellan Skarsgård of Sentimental Value and Teyana Taylor of One Battle After Another, would not be outliers in the data set, accounting for 40.23% and 11.95% of their screen times, respectively. There is no growing trend of supporting acting categories being tarnished with category fraud; 2024 must be an anomaly. Rather, I would say there is an increase in memorable performances by supporting characters that make them linger in our minds.
There is no way to quantify a supporting performance solely in terms of numbers. Setting a percentage-based screen time limit would detract from the value of the category and of film as an art. Instead, studios decide which actors to submit in which categories. Studios want to maximize their chances, so they submit strong performances in supporting categories. These are typically not leading performances; rather, supporting characters have become more fleshed out, actors’ skills have improved and campaigning has changed how the category is viewed.
The purpose of the Oscars should be to award incredible artists with notoriety for their work, not to set limits on what a film or a performance must be. The awards, the film and the idea of how a performance contributed to the film's overall messaging are subjective. So, in the case of the Oscars, every winner is deserving of the category in which they were placed because the subjective culmination of the voters’ minds decided that the most empowering, impactful and memorable artistic expression was that winner.
Oscars night is a celebration of film and all of the minds and hands that come together to make it. The awards are not an objective definition of the perfect performance; they are not limited to those who give awards, and they do not represent the entire film world. I am definitely left dumbfounded at selections on occasion. However, for those voters, the winners represent an achievement in filmmaking.
The Oscars are intentionally vague in their categories; they have many criticisms toward who they nominate and who ends up winning. It is not a perfect organization by any means. However, that is their intention, so they can give out awards without worrying about strict guidelines. Studios know this, so they will submit their actors in categories they think they can win, and they will pander to the academy with their screenwriting, among other gamesmanship.
At the end of the day, “category fraud” exists, but why should I, or anybody else, care? The awards show, now 98 years strong in presenting acting awards, gives lifetime achievement awards, brings attention to rising stars and sometimes it's right on the money, awarding the consensus best performance. We, as viewers, should understand that studios want to win awards because they bring more attention, that the Academy votes not only on performance but also on how memorable a character was and that this has always been the case. The supporting actor and actress categories are not running rampant with fraud — stats and feelings back this up. Instead, we saw a wide audience disagree with the classification of a few actors and actresses' performances as supporting or leading. Sometimes a subjective voting body disappoints me and others, but do not let that detract from the power a film or performance can have.
Brayden Rogers is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bjr236@cornell.edu.
