About a month out from this year’s Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the awards, announced that in two years’ time they would look slightly different. For the first time in nearly a quarter-century, the Academy Awards will add a wholly new category, in the form of a best achievement in casting award. (The most recent previous addition was best animated feature, first awarded for films released in 2001. More recently, sound editing and sound mixing were folded into a single category.) To casual Oscar viewers, this might seem counterintuitive: the ceremony is already so long, and the Academy has already experimented with giving some awards off-air; why would it add a 24th category?
But consider this: the Oscars actually have far fewer categories than the Grammys or the Emmys, both of which hover around 100. And movies are the best! So there’s plenty of room to add more Oscars. In fact, if the Academy is in a giving mood and doesn’t want to wait another two decades and change before adding their 25th competitive category, here are five suggestions for other areas they could delve into:
