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.
