Although the countdown to the 97th Academy Awards has begun, the controversy surrounding the award nominations continues. In this year's acting awards, many people believe that the nominations of Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldana and Ariana Grande are suspected of "category fraud." However, such a situation has precedents in Oscar history. The reason can only be said to be that the weight of the little golden man is too heavy. It is no wonder that filmmakers in Hollywood and even around the world are trying every means to take one home.
Zoe Saldana has more screen time in "Emilia Perez" than Gascón, who is nominated for Best Actress.
The supporting actor nominees have as much screen time as the main actors
The so-called "category fraud" refers to the situation where the registered actor is clearly the leading actor of a film, but because the competition for the Oscar nominees for the leading actor is too fierce, or there is another actor in the same film who has a better chance of competing for the leading actor award, the second leading actor registers for the supporting actor award to avoid internal competition.
In fact, this strategy is not limited to the Oscars. In the previous Golden Globe Awards and British Academy Film Awards, Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldana and Ariana Grande also competed for supporting actor awards and won. Since the opening of the "award season" last year, there have been repeated doubts on social networks about the "category fraud" of these three people. American film critics and film journalists such as Kyle Wilson and Nate Jones, as well as Michael Schuman, a writer for The New Yorker magazine who wrote the book "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears", have published comments in the media criticizing that "this year's Oscar 'category fraud' is the most serious, and it can be called the worst in history."
Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldana and Ariana Grande were nominated for Best Supporting Actor/Actress for "True Pain", "Emilia Perez" and "Wicked" respectively, and the latter two were also candidates for Best Picture. All three films, without exception, are starred by a pair of actors, and the roles of the two are almost equal, and they are not the traditional protagonists and supporting roles at all.
In "Wicked," Cynthia Erivo (left) and Ariana Grande appear only 14 minutes apart.
Take Wicked as an example. A very telling circumstantial evidence is that in the original Broadway musical, the two actresses Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth, who played Elphaba and Glinda, both applied for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. In the movie version, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, who played the two roles, were given a primary and a secondary role.
The more direct evidence is actually the actual appearance time of these actors in the works. An American fanatic named Matthew Stewart built a website called "Screen Time Central" entirely on his own, which detailed the appearance time of Oscar-winning and nominated actors in related works over the years. According to his statistics, in "Wicked", Cynthia Erivo, who was nominated for the leading role, appeared for 1 hour, 25 minutes and 44 seconds, accounting for 53.53% of the total length of the film; while Ariana Grande, who was nominated for a supporting role, appeared for 1 hour, 11 minutes and 25 seconds, accounting for 44.59%.
In comparison, among the actors nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Award, Isabella Rossellini in "The Conclave" only appeared for 8 minutes and 16 seconds, accounting for 6.86%; Felicity Jones in "Wild School" had 41 minutes of screen time, but because the film was three and a half hours long, it only accounted for 19.39%. This is the generally accepted positioning of supporting roles in movies.
Isabella Rossellini in The Conclave.
What is even more problematic are the two actresses in "Emilia Perez". Carla Sofia Gascón, who was eventually nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, only appeared for 52 minutes and 21 seconds, accounting for 39.54%, which is lower than Zoe Saldana, who was nominated for a Supporting Actress, with 57 minutes and 50 seconds and a share of 43.69%.
As for Kieran Culkin in "True Pain", although his screen time in the film is indeed four minutes less than that of the leading actor, screenwriter and director Jesse Eisenberg (62 minutes and 29 seconds), the film tells the story of the cousins' journey to find their roots. As revealed by the difference of only four minutes in appearance time, the two are almost always on the same screen. There is really no reason to define Kieran Culkin as a supporting role.
Back in 1992, when MGM was submitting the film Thelma & Louise, in order to uphold the spirit of seeking truth from facts and fair competition, it submitted both Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon for the Leading Actor Award. Of course, the result was indeed bad. The two actresses, who performed equally well, each took votes from the other, and eventually the two lost to Jodie Foster of The Silence of the Lambs after being nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, the Best Actress BAFTA Award, and the Best Actress Golden Globe Award. The winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year was Mercedes Ruehl of The Fisher King. If MGM had been willing to be a little smart, the Best Supporting Actress Award might have changed hands.
The two leading actors in "Thelma & Louise" both nominated for the Best Actress award that year, but both failed to win.
There is no clear rule on how to distinguish between protagonists and supporting roles
Regarding the distinction between the leading and supporting roles in the Oscars, Michael Schulman, who is well versed in the secrets of the industry, said in an interview with the BBC that there are indeed no strict official regulations, which has led to film companies - including the agencies behind the actors, which are not very prominent in Hollywood but actually have enormous influence - being willing to take shortcuts for strategic reasons to avoid having two co-stars in the same film split votes with each other.
In this year's award season, in the supporting actor category, it can be said that Kieran Culkin of "True Pain" has been the only one who has stood out. He has won all the leading awards such as the Golden Globe, the British Academy Film Awards, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and there is no suspense at all that he will eventually win the Oscar. In the field of supporting actress, Zoe Saldana's situation is similar to his. The election strategies of the two film companies are undoubtedly quite successful. Because according to Michael Schuman and others, if Searchlight Pictures is realistic and registers Kieran Culkin in the leading actor category, letting him compete head-on with Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Ralph Fiennes and others, his chances of kissing the Oscar in the end would probably be much lower.
Kieran Culkin (left) and Jesse Eisenberg are almost in the same boat in "True Pain."
In fact, taking Oscar voting as an example, when the initial nomination list is released, Oscar voters can fill in which actor is the protagonist and which actor is the supporting actor, and there is no mandatory rule. However, in the early publicity campaign, the film company will use various promotional films and publicity materials to "remind" the judges who is the protagonist and who is the supporting actor.
Most of the time, Oscar judges will gladly accept this kind of "reminder", but in rare cases, there are exceptions. The most recent example is "Judas and the Black Messiah" in 2021. Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya actually have similar roles. According to statistics from the "Screen Time Center", the latter's appearance time is less than four minutes. However, when Warner was promoting it at the time, it deliberately packaged Stanfield as the protagonist, and Kaluuya was treated as a supporting role. After the Oscar nominations came out, everyone was dumbfounded. Both of them were nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the same time. This ridiculous result made the Oscar judges a classic case of not "considerate" the "hard work" of the film company. Fortunately, in the end, Kaluuya really defeated Stanfield in the same film and won the little golden man for Best Supporting Actor, and did not reproduce the situation of "mutual harm" between the two candidates in "Thelma & Louise".
Lakeith Stanfield (right) and Daniel Kaluuya were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor for "Judas and the Black Messiah."
Although most authoritative film critics do not like the studio's shortcuts, Rich Klein, president of the London Film Critics Circle, expressed a different opinion in an interview with the BBC. In his opinion, the claim that Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldana and Ariana Grande were suspected of "category fraud" is a bit exaggerated. "True Pain is told from the perspective of the character played by Eisenberg, so Culkin can indeed be considered a supporting role. As for Emilia Perez, when I watched it myself, I felt that it was Rita's (Zoe Saldana) story, and she was the protagonist. But in Netflix's subsequent promotional activities, Emilia played by Gascon was defined as the protagonist. I thought about it and felt that I could accept it because Emilia's mental journey did drive the narrative of the entire film."
It seems that how to define the main and supporting roles is very subjective, and in many cases everyone has their own reasons. However, as Michael Schuman emphasized, this year's supporting actor nominees included Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldana and Ariana Grande at the expense of excellent actors such as Isabella Rossellini and Yura Borisov (Anora). These two people appeared in their respective films for a short time, but both left a deep impression on people. Perhaps this is the true criterion for the supporting actor award. As a result, it was encountered with so-called supporting actors such as Saldana, Grande and Culkin who have a lot of scenes. It is really unfair.
Yura Borisov in Anora
"Think about Viola Davis, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences in 2017. That year, she beat Naomie Harris of Moonlight and Michelle Williams of Manchester by the Sea, but Davis had 53 minutes on screen, while the other two only had about 10 minutes each. Was Davis really just a supporting role?" Schumann asked. "You could certainly say yes, but don't forget that she played the same role in the Broadway production of Fences and won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play."
Viola Davis won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences.
