The Oscar Grouch: What We Talk About When We Talk About Category Fraud

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published Oct. 17, 2016, 12:43 p.m. ET

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A few weeks ago in this space, I was enthusing about what a phenomenal year this is shaping up to be for the Best Actress category. And that was before I saw Annette Bening in 20th Century Women and Isabelle Huppert in Elle. It’s looking so good for lead actresses this year that there will be far more worthy performances than there are Oscar nominations to hand out to them, and some great actresses are going to be empty-handed on nomination morning. And since there are people who are paid a lot of money so that doesn’t happen, the Oscar campaigns  for a few of those films will undoubtedly ponder category fraud. Which is to say, some lead performances will be campaigned as supporting in order to court nominations. Already, there have been rumblings that Bening and/or Viola Davis (in Denzel Washington’s film adaptation of Fences) might be pushed as supporting actresses in order to avoid what is shaping up to be an Emma Stone (La La Land) vs. Natalie Portman (Jackie) year.

If you’re thinking a term like “category fraud” sounds a little severe and statutory for something so ephemeral as an Oscar campaign, GOOD. It’s supposed to sound serious, because IT IS. Category fraud makes meaningless the distinctions between carefully chosen award categories. It squeezes our true supporting performances in favor of leads who are slumming it. It contributes to the idea that the truth is malleable in service of an award. It degrades the very fabric of our morality and truth. Also, it’s just SUPER annoying.

So, before we get too far down this awardsy rabbit hole, we should define our terms.

What Is Category Fraud

When someone mentions “category fraud” in relation to the Oscars, they’re talking about movie studios fudging the truth in order to campaign a movie/actor/screenplay in a different, less competitive category. This mostly materializes in one of three ways:

  • An actor or actress who gives a lead performance in a film gets campaigned as a supporting performer in order to better their chances. It automatically makes the actor in question a stronger contender, if only by virtue of having more screen time (and often more carefully-drawn characters) with which to work.
  • A screenplay whose origins are murky — based on real events but no specific book, say — could choose to campaign as original or adapted, depending on which category looks softer that year.
  • This one is specifically for the Golden Globes, but movies that toe the line between comedy and drama almost always try to campaign as comedies, where instead of being a light drama they’ll be a weighty comedy. This got a lot of flak last year when The Martian was nominated as a comedy.

For the purposes of this article, I mostly want to focus on the actors.

How Can They Get Away With This?

Sometimes they can’t! The Golden Globes, for example, make the decisions themselves as to whether a performance is lead or supporting. Which is why some years you’ll see things like Catherine Zeta Jones getting a Globe nomination as lead actress in Chicago before winning the Oscar in supporting. Just last year, Alicia Vikander frauded her way into a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Danish Girl. But the Globes determined that she (as well as fellow fraudulent nominee) Rooney Mara in Carol were true leads, so they were nominated in that category and got creamed by Brie Larson for Room.

The Oscars, however, allow voters to nominate performances in whichever category they deem appropriate, and 90% of the time, voters default to how the actors are being campaigned by the studios. If you’ve ever seen a screener DVD that a studio has sent to an award voter, you’ll notice that they are usually adorned with packaging that tells you who they’re campaigning for the movie and in which categories. And so Vikander and Mara were nominated as supporting actresses by the Oscars, in accordance with their studios’ wishes.

Of course, given that complete freedom, sometimes Oscar voters have minds of their own. In 2003, Keisha Castle-Hughes was being campaigned by Newmarket Films as a supporting actress in Whale Rider, even though she was most decidedly the film’s lead (we’ll get to rampant juvenile category fraud momentarily). Oscar voters were all “nahhhhh” about that and ended up voting her in as a lead actress. The most famous example of this came in 2008, when Kate Winslet was getting massive Oscar buzz for two separate films: Revolutionary Road and The Reader. With a lead campaign in place for the former film, Harvey Weinstein campaigned her as a supporting actress for the reader, and at the Golden Globes (which went for Weinstein’s placement), Winslet won BOTH lead and supporting trophies. Oscar voters had other ideas, voting for her as a lead in The Reader and thus bumping off her Revolutionary Road nod (an actor can’t be nominated twice in the same category).

Gimmie More Examples

Gladly! So when a studio decides to commit category fraud, it’s for one of four reasons:

    • The Film Has Two Leads of the Same Gender. This is overwhelmingly the most common justification for a fraudulent campaign. Thelma and Louise in 1991 was the last movie where two leads from the same movie were nominated in the same category. And they both lost to Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs, giving the impression that they split the vote of Thelma and Louise fans and knocked each other out. Since then, studios either determine which lead they’re going to push heavily and ignore the other one (Russell Crowe over Al Pacino in The Insider; Annette Bening over Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right) or else they get brazen and campaign the “lesser” performance (the one with less acclaim; the one with less screen time; the less showy one) as supporting. Examples:
    • The Film Is a “True Ensemble” With No Campaigned Leads: This is probably the least-often successful gambit, mostly because the roles are smaller. Think Michael Keaton for Spotlight last year, who ironically probably would have had a good shot at a nomination in an uncharacteristically weak Best Actor year, but the whole Spotlight cast was campaigned as supporting, and Keaton was beat to a nomination by co-star Mark Ruffalo. This gambit ends up working best in ensembles where the narrative is chopped up into several isolated stories. So while George Clooney in Syriana and Benicio Del Toro in Traffic are “supporting” players due to the fact that their films spread out all the performances into smallish segments, they’re still the central figures of their little corners of the film, so they get to shine. (Both Clooney and Del Toro won Oscars for this tactic.)
    • The Film’s Lead Is a Child: For whatever reason, Hollywood just refuses to campaign children in lead categories, even when there are no other conceivable leads in their films. Sometimes the voters push back, like in the Whale Rider example. Sometimes they just don’t go for it in either category, like when teen Dev Patel was preposterously campaigned as a supporting actor for Slumdog Millionaire. (History may end up repeating itself here, though less brazenly, if Patel gets pushed as supporting in Lion, where he plays the lead character, albeit only as an adult in the film’s second half.) Some other examples:
    • The Actor/Actress Isn’t Famous Enough: While the Oscars have been known to bestow awards on newcomers, it’s not always the easiest route. And that goes double for character actors who might have trouble going up against the Tom Cruises and Sean Penns of the world. This often ends up happening in movies with male and female leads where there an imbalance in screen time or fame levels.

Tell Me Why It’s Better If This Doesn’t Happen?

Besides the fact that truth matters and that words have meaning and we should strive for accuracy above all, you mean? Sure, some may suggest that being a stickler for the rules might mean that certain borderline performances might slip through the cracks. But the more lead performers who take up slots in supporting just means we lose out in true great supporting performers. There’s something of value to a performance that’s truly small but special. There’s a degree of difficulty when it comes to making your mark without a lot of screen time, and it would be nice if those performances got more love. Just last year, Rooney Mara’s Carol performance could (and should) have been nominated as a lead, freeing up space for oh, say, Sarah Paulson from the same film, who did so much with far less time to do it in. If I can’t impress upon you to be a stickler for sticklerism’s sake, you can at least consider doing it for Sarah Paulson’s.