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\n Keeping pace with Hollywood\u2019s awards horserace. Sign up for the newsletter here<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s another craft category filled with Best Picture nominees, but each one reveals something about the Academy\u2019s newest trophy. For the first time since the advent of the Animated Feature category in 2002, the Oscars have a new trophy: It\u2019s the award for Achievement in Casting<\/a>, which will have two years as the Academy\u2019s shiny new toy until the Best Stunts Oscar<\/a> comes along to steal its thunder in 2028.<\/p>\n Since it\u2019s never existed before, the Casting Oscar was the subject of much pre-nomination scuttlebutt. Would this be yet another craft category that would be entirely filled with Best Picture nominees? And would voters truly be able to recognize the specific responsibilities of the casting director, and not merely treat it as a stand-in for a Best Ensemble prize?<\/p>\n Now that we have our first five Casting nominees, the early answers to those questions are yes, and hopefully. Though films like Weapons and Sir\u0101t cracked the shortlist<\/a>, in the end the casting branch stocked the category entirely with Best Picture nominees: Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, and Sinners. However, I\u2019d venture that the picks do share an awareness of the unique role casting directors play. Of these five films, three feature major discoveries, young unknowns who blow you away. A few hand prominent roles to non-professionals, creating a world that feels vibrant and lived-in. Others involve an extra layer of difficulty: finding actors with musical talent, or who can handle period dialogue. \u201cIt\u2019s a testament to who we are,\u201d says Kim Taylor-Coleman, a casting director on films like Highest 2 Lowest and Harriet, and a member of the Academy\u2019s Board of Governors, of the different approaches represented by the nominees. \u201cYou have star names, you have A-Listers, you have newcomers, you have street actors.\u201d<\/p>\n You also see this in the films the branch didn\u2019t nominate. For Oscar-watchers, the most eye-catching miss in the Casting category\u2019s first year was Joachim Trier\u2019s Sentimental Value, which went on to earn four acting nominations. If all of its principal cast members were nominated for Oscars, how could its casting not be recognized? Perhaps out of a desire to reward choices made by casting directors, and not by filmmakers. Of that quartet, Actress nominee Renate Reinsve\u2019s role was written for her by Trier, while Supporting Actor frontrunner Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd was also a director choice. (Which is not to take anything away from the strong work done by casting directors Yngvill Kolset Haga and Avy Kaufman, each of whom found one of the film\u2019s Supporting Actress nominees, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning, respectively.)<\/p>\n Like a few other craft categories at the Oscars, the casting race employs what\u2019s known as a \u201cbake-off\u201d: In the weeks leading up to the nominations, the 10 shortlisted films do in-person and virtual presentations offering background on their specific processes. Only members of the casting branch vote on the nominations, but the bake-off is open to members from across the Academy, since they\u2019ll be the ones voting on the winner. If you ask people involved in the casting branch, the bake-off was a huge success, with many attendees coming away with a greater understanding of casting.<\/p>\n \u201cBasically, we walked them through what we do,\u201d said Taylor-Coleman. \u201cWe are one of the first people hired in pre-production. We set the tone for a film. Everything has to feel cohesive and organic. It\u2019s like putting a puzzle together: Each piece has to fit.\u201d<\/p>\n What can the five nominated films tell us about the kind of casting puzzles the Academy finds most impressive? I spoke to a few working casting directors, and dove into each nominee\u2019s campaign messaging, to find out.<\/p>\n Photo: Focus Features\n <\/p>\n On paper, casting Hamnet seems like it must have been a no-brainer: Simply get two respected actors around the age of thirty. Ideally they\u2019d both be previously Oscar-nominated. Preferably Irish. But star casting can be harder than it looks. Most big-name actors are offer-only, meaning they don\u2019t audition. For projects like this one, casting directors essentially make a list of possibilities, and discuss with the director who to prioritize. That\u2019s how Chlo\u00e9 Zhao and casting director Nina Gold wound up choosing Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal for the leads in Hamnet. By most accounts they made the right choices. \u201cAnytime you cast contemporary actors who can convince you that they belong in a different time period, yet still feel relevant today, that\u2019s always good,\u201d says one casting director. \u201cNot everyone can handle that language.\u201d In further proof of a job well-done, Buckley looks set to walk away with the Best Actress trophy.<\/p>\n But the Hamnet campaign seems to be betting that more Oscar-worthy feat was finding the titular character: Shakespeare\u2019s doomed 11-year-old son. As one of the U.K\u2019s most venerated casting directors, Gold has a long track record unearthing brilliant young talent. (She discovered an entire generation of child actors for Game of Thrones.) She told Awards Buzz<\/a> that finding Hamnet was a \u201cgigantic process.\u201d Auditioning kids is usually a war of attrition: You\u2019ve got to see as many as possible, often as many times as possible. \u201cYou can\u2019t cut the corners of having a thorough and quite grueling process,\u201d Gold told the site. Ultimately, after meeting \u201cloads of kids,\u201d the needle in the haystack turned out to be Jacobi Jupe, whom she\u2019d previously seen for a part in Jay Roach\u2019s The Roses. He was too young for that part, but just right for this one. One Jupe led to another: After Jacobi was cast, Gold kicked around the idea of bringing in his older brother, Noah Jupe from A Quiet Place, for a cameo as the actor who plays Hamlet in the play-within-the-film. At first, scheduling conflicts put a kibosh on that plan. But in what Gold called an \u201cincredible bit of serendipity,\u201d Noah\u2019s movie finished ahead of schedule, allowing Jupe the Elder to add a note of extratextual poignancy<\/a> to Hamnet\u2019s climax.<\/p>\n Photo: Courtesy of A24\n <\/p>\n \u201cEveryone wants the thing that I\u2019m doing,\u201d Venditti said when I interviewed her for a big story about casting directors<\/a> last spring. \u201cBut they don\u2019t want to create the support that it takes to do it. Because it\u2019s very different from traditional casting.\u201d<\/p>\n Venditti got her start working in fashion, then in 2007 directed a verite documentary called Billy the Kid, which earned her cred in cinephile circles. Her speciality is finding regular people out in the wild, for projects that aim for gritty realism \u2014 American Honey, Euphoria, and the Safdie brothers\u2019 films Good Time and Uncut Gems, which led her to casting Josh Sadfie\u2019s Marty Supreme. (In light of last week\u2019s news<\/a>, it\u2019s worth noting Venditti did not hire<\/a> Buddy Duress for Good Time.) \u201cI don\u2019t really care about films,\u201d she told one YouTube interviewer<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m obsessed with people-watching and the cinema of real life.\u201d<\/p>\n Venditti\u2019s practice involves extensive on-the-ground scouting for even the smallest roles, an intense interview process, and improv exercises to get the first-timers comfortable. She\u2019s looking for friction \u2014 people who don\u2019t blend in, but pop. Her brief on Marty Supreme included plenty of cameos from boldfaced names squaring off against Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s live-wire lead performance: writer Pico Iyer<\/a> as an officious ping-pong executive, grocery magnate John Catsimatidis as a ball manufacturer, film director Abel Ferrara as a dog lover, playwright David Mamet as a theater director, and many, many more<\/a>. (The villain is played by Shark Tank mogul Kevin O\u2019Leary<\/a>, but co-writer Ronald Bronstein has been getting the credit for that pick.) \u201cMarty Supreme favors a style of acting that\u2019s far less dependent on technique to construct scenes than on personality and presence to create moments,\u201d the New Yorker\u2019s Richard Brody<\/a> wrote, \u201cwhich explains the film\u2019s zesty mix of professional actors with notables from other fields of endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n And as much as the work of production designer Jack Fisk<\/a> creates the sense of being whisked back to the New York of the 1950s, so too does Venditti\u2019s documentary-style approach to casting help Marty Supreme feel like a cinematic time capsule. The globe-trotting ping-pong epic has a cast of hundreds, and you\u2019d swear that none of them had ever seen a cell phone in their lives.<\/p>\n Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures\n <\/p>\n As with Venditti and the Safdies, Kulukundis is the casting director in charge of Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s unofficial repertory company. She started as an intern on his debut, Hard Eight, and has cast all of his films since Magnolia. Leonardo DiCaprio came pre-attached to the project, but Kulukundis was responsible for populating the various worlds around him. \u201cShe did great work filling out the canvas of all those different people: the revolutionaries, the Latino skateboarders and the families, the Christmas Adventurers,\u201d says a casting director. True to its origins in a Thomas Pynchon novel, One Battle After Another blends a bunch of genres that don\u2019t seem like they should work together \u2014 imagine if Jeff \u201cThe Dude\u201d Lebowski got stuck in the middle of Alex Garland\u2019s Civil War \u2014 if not for Kulukundis\u2019s casting knitting it all together: non-professionals, character actors<\/a>, and one actual federal agent<\/a> all sharing scenes together. (There\u2019s even an unexpected overlap with Marty Supreme, in the presence of Yale professor Paul Grimstad<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u201cThese worlds are all very provocative,\u201d the casting director says. \u201cThose tonal things, when you\u2019re treading a line, are sometimes tricky for casting directors to get right. What a treat to be able to cast such a varied canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n Other members of the film\u2019s ensemble, like Regina Hall, were hired by Anderson directly, but Kulukundis was responsible for finding the film\u2019s hardest-to-cast character. The part of Willa, DiCaprio\u2019s character\u2019s daughter, needed to be played by a biracial actress who read as high-school-aged but had the gravitas to hold her own against DiCaprio and Sean Penn \u2014 and ideally also had martial arts experience. One Battle\u2019s campaign has been highlighting the difficulty of this search, which lasted over five years. Kulukundis discovered Chase Infiniti when a friend sent her a recording of Infiniti\u2019s K-pop dance troupe. Though she immediately noticed something special about her, Anderson took more convincing. Together they put Infiniti through months of screen tests and chemistry reads before PTA finally saw what his casting director did. As Kulukundis told Backstage<\/a>, \u201cShe had the best balance of pure innocence and \u2018I will kill you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Neon\n <\/p>\n One word that people in casting love to use is organic. \u201cI don\u2019t want to see the fingerprints,\u201d a casting director told me. In other words, unless you\u2019re going for that specific effect, you don\u2019t want an ensemble to feel like a group of actors; you want it to feel like a collection of faces that have been pulled from an actual environment.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the reason Gabriel Domingues\u2019s work on The Secret Agent \u2014 the only non-English language Casting nominee \u2014 has been so widely acclaimed. The film takes place in Brazil in the late 1970s, and the way Domingues assembled its human fabric, even those viewers who were never there now feel as if they\u2019ve visited. Those who were there were even more effusive. \u201cI saw it with a friend of mine who used to live in Brazil,\u201d a casting director said. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m having a sense memory. Everything about this movie, they got it correct.\u2019 It really felt like you were dropped into a world.\u201d<\/p>\n The Secret Agent\u2019s primary setting is a house full of misfits and refugees in the northeastern city of Recife, a safe harbor from those persecuted by the country\u2019s military regime, ruled over by the inimitable Dona Sebastiana (T\u00e2nia Maria<\/a>, whose role was written specifically for her). Director Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho \u201cwanted to create a universe that was very faithful to the atmosphere and energy of the 1970s,\u201d Domingues told Indiewire<\/a>. \u201cThat meant finding certain faces that looked like they might have existed in 1978.\u201d Besides reflecting the diversity of northern Brazil, his work involved an unconventional sort of research; one character, a hired assassin, was meant to resemble a famous serial killer of the period. \u201cIn the 1970s, Brazil had even more social inequality than we do now,\u201d Domingues said. \u201cThe economic disparity was even worse. So it was important to find people who looked like the specific types of people who would be working in each job at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n Of the five Casting nominees, The Secret Agent is the only one that wasn\u2019t also nominated for Best Cast at SAG\u2019s Actor Awards. But if it is the one that ultimately prevails on Oscar night, its colorful cast \u2014 a seamless mix of first-timers and professionals \u2014 will be the reason why.<\/p>\n Photo: Warner Bros.\n <\/p>\n When I asked casting directors last year what factors they would take into consideration when voting on the Oscars, a few mentioned degree of difficulty: finding people who could not only act, but also sing and dance. (Many people, not all of whom worked on Wicked, brought up Wicked in this context.) That was the hurdle for Francine Maisler on Sinners, a film built around show-stopping musical numbers. Not least because the character of Sammy, a young juke-joint performer, was also meant to be the film\u2019s secret protagonist. After apparently \u201cthousands\u201d<\/a> of auditions, Maisler landed on Miles Caton, an up-and-coming musician from Brooklyn who had no previous film experience.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not a religious person, but when Miles opened his mouth, I thought there\u2019s got to be something upstairs that gives us this voice that comes through this young man,\u201d Maisler told Casting Networks<\/a>. \u201cIt felt otherworldly and beautiful, and it touched me deeply.\u201d It also touched the actors in SAG, who handed Caton a supporting-actor nomination.<\/p>\n Though Sinners takes place even further in the past than Marty Supreme or The Secret Agent, as a vampire thriller it\u2019s less focused on period verisimilitude. Casting genre films is different from casting prestige dramas, a casting director told me. It\u2019s not that you take it less seriously. \u201cBut it\u2019s heightened. That has to just deal with the nature of the film itself, the tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that it has. Jack O\u2019Connell, Delroy Lindo \u2014 it\u2019s fun to cast actors who can play it heightened, but also keep it real.\u201d Or think of someone like Hailee Steinfeld, who might seem a bit too modern for a straight 1930s period piece, but fits in with the Southern Gothic tone Ryan Coogler was aiming for.<\/p>\n The other thing Sinners\u2019 campaign has going for it is Maisler herself. In Hollywood, she is considered \u201cfirst among equals,\u201d one casting director told me \u2014 an industry legend whose resume includes over a dozen Best Picture nominees, including winners 12 Years a Slave and Birdman, as well as Succession. If voters want the inaugural Casting Oscar to reflect the years of invisible work that previously went unrewarded, there might be no better symbolic pick.<\/p>\n Sign up for Gold Rush<\/p>\n A newsletter about the perpetual Hollywood awards race.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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