By Lindsey Bahr
Casting directors are some of the most important creatives in entertainment but have never been celebrated as such on Hollywood's biggest night. Starting next year, however, that all changes.
The Oscars will add a new award to recognize achievement in casting for films released in 2025 and beyond, the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Thursday.
Not counting the short-lived " popular film Oscar " which never came to be, this is the first time the academy has added a category since best animated feature film was established in 2001.
"Casting directors play an essential role in filmmaking, and as the Academy evolves, we are proud to add casting to the disciplines that we recognize and celebrate," Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Janet Yang said in a joint statement.
The casting directors' branch was created in July 2013 and currently has nearly 160 members.
"This award is a deserved acknowledgment of our casting directors' exceptional talents and a testament to the dedicated efforts of our branch," said Academy Casting Directors Branch governors Richard Hicks, Kim Taylor-Coleman and Debra Zane in a statement.
The first statuette will be presented starting with the 98th Academy Awards in 2026.
Casting directors, and stunt performers, have long lobbied for an Oscar category to recognize their specific contributions to film. But for now, the stunts will have to wait.
Lindsey Bahr is an AP film writer
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More