The announcement came as a surprise for several reasons. For one, ratings for the Oscars telecast have been down in recent years and there is much pressure to get those numbers up. Adding another category to present during the telecast will make it even trickier to make the show tight enough to air. Might this result in more categories being presented off-air? Let’s hope not. Academy Casting Director Branch governors Richard Hicks, Kim Taylor-Colman, and Debra Zane had this to say about it:
“On behalf of the members of the Casting Directors Branch, we’d like to thank the Board of Governors, the Awards Committee, and Academy leadership for their support. This award is a deserved acknowledgment of our casting directors’ exceptional talents and a testament to the dedicated efforts of our branch.”
This category addition may also open the floodgates for calls to get other areas of filmmaking acknowledged. In particular, there has been a lot of interest in seeing a category to recognize stunts in films. “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski and his former co-director David Leitch, of “Deadpool 2” fame, have been vocal about getting The Academy to add such a category. Whether or not this casting category makes that more or less likely to happen any time soon remains to be seen.
The 96th annual Academy Awards are set to air on ABC on Sunday, March 10, 2024.