For all the talk about how much the Academy Awards have changed in recent years, one key facet has remained remarkably constant: the category lineup. Aside from the two sound categories merging, there have been no changes to the list of Oscar categories since best animated feature was introduced in 2001.
This year, that changes. Casting directors are finally getting their due. This poses a rather unique challenge for forecasters. This is my 15th year predicting the Academy Awards using only math, so what’s an Oscar prognosticator to do when the historical data simply doesn’t exist? Training data is the meal that feeds the model!
I decided to try and build up that data. To do so, I turned to the experts: the casting directors themselves.
I reached out to the Casting Society, and to my deep gratitude, they were happy to help. They allowed me to poll their membership, and 92 casting directors took time out of their days to respond. For each year from 2010-2025, I provided a shortlist of the 15 films I judged to be most likely to have received Oscar nominations for best casting in each year. Each of the voters ranked their top five from each awards season. I then applied the Academy’s voting procedures: ranked-choice to determine the nominations list, single-vote to determine the winner among the nominees.
It’s not a perfect proxy for what the Academy would have done. Casting directors likely know more about their own craft than Academy members at large. These voters were gifted the benefit of the hindsight which Oscar voters are not. In one case, a celebrated casting director who filled out the poll even had the opportunity to vote for herself on many occasions (but in a tribute to her humility, she often voted for others over her own work). Still, in the absence of a time machine and the ability to poll the Oscar voters from each year, this is likely the best we can do.
Not only do the Casting Society survey results for The Hollywood Reporter provide that historical dataset my model is hungry for, but they also can teach us quite a bit about this exciting new category. With that, let’s take a walk down the alternate history of best casting…
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2010: ‘Inglourious Basterds’
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It’s rare for a film on the outside looking in at the best picture race to be so far ahead in best casting, but that’s exactly what happened in the first year I polled. Jenny Jue and Johanna Ray picked out the exact right mix of actors to portray Nazi hunters and Nazis for a film that won ensemble honors from the Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice Awards, and it won handily in this poll of what-could-have-been at the Oscars.
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2011: ‘The Social Network’
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This year was all about The King’s Speech vs. The Social Network, and the best casting category would have been no difference, with Black Swan also working its way into the conversation. Despite The King’s Speech earning three Oscar nominations for acting compared to just one for those other two films, the Casting Society voters would lean towards The Social Network. A notable absence: The Fighter, the only film since 2009 with multiple Oscar wins for acting but without even a nomination in this poll.
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2012: ‘The Help’
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While plenty of movies dubbed “comedies” by the Golden Globes earn Oscar nominations, true laugh-out-loud comedies rarely break into the awards conversation. Bridesmaids represents a departure from that norm, and would have been a strong contender to win an Oscar for its casting. Ultimately, the voters put it in second place behind The Help, the same film that defeated Bridesmaids for best supporting actress.
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2013: ‘Argo’
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Lora Kennedy is the likely winner from Argo, which would have only increased the oddity of Argo receiving nearly every honor imaginable except a best director nomination. That said, Beasts of the Southern Wild discovering Quvenzhané Wallis was probably the biggest casting story of the season, and might have been enough to propel it to the Oscar.
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2014: ‘12 Years a Slave’
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This is the first of two consecutive wins for Francine Maisler (12 Years a Slave, Birdman). That might prove relevant to this year’s Oscars. Maisler is nominated for Sinners, an extremely strong casting job that could win even a rookie casting director an Oscar. But add in the fact that a number of industry insiders will feel she deserves an Oscar (not just the hypothetical ones in this article!) for her impressive body of work, and that could be more than enough to vault her into first place.
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2015: ‘Birdman’
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Boyhood’s Beth Sepko had an incredibly challenging task, finding the right cast for the film who would gracefully grow up before our eyes over a dozen years. This would have been extremely close, but the Casting Society voters barely lean towards Francine Maisler’s work on Birdman, which went on to win best picture.
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2016: ‘Spotlight’
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Of the 16 years covered by this poll, five of them came down to a difference of three or fewer votes between the first and second place finishers. This is one of those years, with Spotlight edging out Room by just three votes (after the preferential-ballot step that narrowed down the initial list of 15 to the 5 nominees). While we never get to observe the final ballot totals at the Oscars, this is a good reminder that behind the scenes, quite a few of the results likely come down to a surprisingly small margin.
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2017: ‘Moonlight’
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Per the poll respondents, Yesi Ramirez and Moonlight would have won in a landslide. Perhaps that would have been an early clue that, no matter what the envelope might say, La La Land was no sure thing to sweep the remaining categories.
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2018: ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
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There’s no major standout on which film was the best cast in this year, with no film even garnering 30 percent of the votes. Sarah Halley Finn wins her first of two consecutive Oscars for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but it just as easily could have gone to any of the five on this list.
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2019: ‘Black Panther’
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Black Panther is a notable winner in its own right, coming ahead in a landslide despite not being the best picture frontrunner and receiving no acting nominations. But just as noteworthy is one of the films that didn’t win: Crazy Rich Asians. It’s the only film in this entire article that wasn’t invited to the Oscars in real life, but would have been had the casting category existed at the time.
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2020: ‘Once Upon a Time In Hollywood’
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I imagine Parasite would have been a strong contender here, but there’s a lesson to take away from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s win: receiving acting nominations matters. Black Panther is the lone exception to the rule, as the only winner on this list who received no acting nods. Parasite ends up as the very close runner-up to Victoria Thomas’ work casting Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and a stellar supporting ensemble.
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2021: ‘Nomadland’
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This might have been one of the more controversial choices in the category’s history. After all, Nomadland featured a mix of established actors and real-life nomads. In fact, the Casting Society’s Artios Awards chose not to even nominate Nomadland, and it’s the only winners in this article not nominated by the Screen Actors Guild for Best Cast. And yet, five years removed, the casting directors have now decided that Nathan Harrison and Hannah Peterson’s work on Chloé Zhao’s film was indeed worthy of the Oscar.
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2022: ‘CODA’
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Had best casting existed, it might have changed our entire perception of this year’s Oscar race. As you may recall, The Power of the Dog appeared to be the frontrunner, entering with twelve nominations to CODA’s three, and CODA didn’t receive a directing or editing nomination. But in this version of events, CODA receives a best casting nomination (and goes on to win in a landslide), while The Power of the Dog gets left out of the category altogether despite its four acting nominations. Maybe that’s not enough to make CODA the best picture frontrunner, but it sure starts to feel closer.
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2023: ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
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Only three films have ever won three acting Oscars: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Network (1976), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). I would have been quite surprised had this one gone to any other nominee, and the Casting Society of America sees it the same way.
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2024: ‘Oppenheimer’
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Oppenheimer might seem like the obvious choice in hindsight, but it wouldn’t have been so clear at the time. The Casting Society themselves chose Killers of the Flower Moon over Oppenheimer at the Artios Awards. But fast-forward to the Oscars, and John Papsidera probably reaches the Dolby stage for the cast he assembled for Christopher Nolan’s epic.
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2025: ‘Wicked’
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One of the most nail-biting races would have been just one year ago. Sean Baker and Samantha Quan won the casting BAFTA for Anora. Nina Gold and Martin Ware put together the Conclave cast that took home Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice ensemble honors. And yet, in a thrilling finish, it’s Bernard Telsey and Tiffany Little Canfield who hear their names called for Wicked.
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What about all the other years before 2010? I did go through the exercise of estimating what might have won best casting over 96 years of Academy Awards history, based on the few available data points. But that relies heavily on my own personal guesswork.
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Where does that leave us for this year? I included my best attempt at best casting probabilities based on this historical dataset in my article that walks through all of this year’s categories. But beyond just this year, there’s a lot we can learn here: This category is going to be tightly connected to best picture. Larger ensemble casts do well. Earning Oscar acting nominations helps. The Screen Actors Guild and Artios Awards are relevant here, whereas the BAFTAs aren’t quite on the same page as the Oscars when it comes to casting.
Somewhere in an accountant’s office, the 2026 results are already known, hidden away from the world until March 15. So, if you’ll forgive the pun, it seems the die has already been “cast.”
Ben Zauzmer is the author of Oscarmetrics: The Math Behind the Biggest Night in Hollywood.
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