Each year when the Oscar nominations are announced, followers of the awards horse race pull out a familiar term: category fraud. This refers to the phenomenon of an actor’s name showing up in a category that doesn’t jibe with the actual time they spend onscreen, blurring the line between what separates a leading performance from a supporting one. It’s essentially a way for studios to maximize the amount of nominations a movie can receive.
This year, media critics have called out two nominees who seemingly have the supporting actor and actress categories on lock: Kieran Culkin (“A Real Pain”) and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”). Based on their whopping amount of screen time alone, even the most casual moviegoer would agree that it makes much more sense to classify them as leads.
In “A Real Pain,” Culkin plays the rascally, emotionally troubled Benji Kaplan opposite writer-director Jesse Eisenberg. In Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Saldaña portrays Rita Mora Castro, a talented lawyer with divine pop-and-lock skills. And though Eisenberg and “Emilia Pérez” best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón are certainly also leads, Culkin and Saldaña’s characters are equally central to each film.
Jesse Eisenberg Walks a Fine Line Between Acting + Filmmaking in ‘A Real Pain’ Another notable example from this year: Ariana Grande, who’s competing as a supporting actress in “Wicked” even though she has almost as much screen time as her costar, best actress nominee Cynthia Erivo. Contrast that with “Conclave” best actor nominee Ralph Fiennes, who appears in almost every scene in the film, and supporting actress nominee Isabella Rossellini, who is onscreen for less than 10 minutes.
This gambit has been known to backfire, however. In 2003, Keisha Castle-Hughes of “Whale Rider” was submitted in the supporting category despite very clearly being the lead. But Oscar nominators rejected this suggestion, and the 13-year-old performer wound up in the running for best actress.
The Golden Globes are an even more likely target for category fraud, since the Golden Globe Foundation separates films into two categories: drama, and musical or comedy. Famously, Ridley Scott’s 2015 sci-fi flick “The Martian” competed in (and won) the latter even though it was clearly a drama. This year is no exception: Coralie Fargeat’s harrowing “The Substance” was nominated as a comedy, while the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” was categorized as a drama despite having almost as many musical numbers as “Emilia Pérez” and “Wicked.”
Category fraud is hardly a new phenomenon. One of the most infamous examples happened at the 23rd Academy Awards in 1951, when Bette Davis and Anne Baxter were both nominated in the best actress category for “All About Eve,” even though Davis’ Margo Channing was obviously the main character. It was a deliciously meta move, considering the film’s plot revolves around a young starlet (Baxter) trying to steal the spotlight from a theater legend (Davis).
Anne Baxter and Bette Davis in “All About Eve” CRED 20th Century Fox/RGR Collection/Alamy
Then there’s the case of 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” when Samuel L. Jackson wound up in the supporting category while his costar, then–comeback king John Travolta, competed as the lead. In 2002, Ethan Hawke was up for supporting actor for “Training Day” despite having slightly more screen time than his costar Denzel Washington, who won for best actor. The tactic paid off in 2016 for “The Danish Girl” when Alicia Vikander took home the supporting actress statuette despite her character’s obvious protagonist status.
It can also work in the other direction: Though Anthony Hopkins was only onscreen for 16 minutes of the two-hour-long “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), he won best actor at the 64th Academy Awards. Other examples include David Niven in 1958’s “Separate Tables,” Patricia Neal in 1963’s “Hud,” and Louise Fletcher in 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Despite taking up only 15–20% of each film’s runtime, they were all winners in the leading categories.
There was a time when studios were less afraid of letting true co-leads duke it out. See Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger (“Terms of Endearment”), F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce (“Amadeus”), and Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon (“Thelma & Louise”). However, the practice continues to be common in the supporting categories. Recent examples include Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone for “The Favourite,” Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee for “The Power of the Dog,” and Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
They don’t call it Oscar bait for nothing; but in this Hollywood shell game, you could just as easily call it a bait and switch.
This story originally appeared in the Feb. 13 issue of Backstage Magazine.