What if there had been a Best Casting Oscar this past decade?

Since we shared the news that Casting Director David Rubin had become the new president of the Academy, we've been thinking a lot about a potential Best Casting Oscar. The common 'they shouldn't do this' feeling in the comments and on twitter was based on the fact that the Academy would likely get it all wrong and only pick a random sampling of Best Picture nominees with starry casts. But that's never a reason not to have a category when there should be one. Lord knows they get a lot of things wrong and many of the branches are susceptible to strangely ignoring anything outside of the Best Picture race even if the film isn't strong in their particular field.

Here at TFE, in our Film Bitch Awards, we've had a Best Casting category since 2013 which makes it pretty much our newest category. Why did we wait so long? Who knows. But after the jump we thought we'd share our nominees each year and what we think Oscar would have nominated in those same time frames. Play along in the comments, won'cha?

2013
Film Bitch Nominees	What Would Oscar Have Chosen?

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Great Acceptance Speeches: Allison Janney, "I, Tonya"

We asked Team Experience to share their favourite Oscar acceptance speeches as we countdown to Hollywood's High Holy Night. Here's Dancin' Dan...

PERFECTION.

Look, I was rooting for Laurie Metcalf, too, but how can you deny this moment?

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Months of Meryl: The Post (2017)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#52 — Katharine “Kay” Graham, pioneering Washington Post publisher who authorized the printing of the Pentagon Papers.

JOHN: Since it was first announced in March of 2017, deep into the first hundred days of the Trump presidency, The Post moved at a breakneck speed from rewriting to shooting to post-production before it quickly arrived in theaters in December of that year. Spielberg had paused production on his historical drama The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara and after reading a spec script by Liz Hannah, set the gears into motion on The Post, assembling his usual team (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, among others), along with two screen legends who had never before shared a single frame. This urgent sense of timeliness is palpable in The Post, which is both a riveting period piece about a landmark historical moment and a rousing paean to the free press in our distressing present...

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Blueprints: "A Fantastic Woman"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge has been highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “T”, the last installment in this miniseries, he looks at the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.

The LGBT experience encompasses all types of people, genders, nationalities, economic statuses, and every intersectionality in between. It doesn’t look one single way, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one, either. As the canon of queer cinema being to expand beyond one or two points of view, the ways in which film reflects this experience starts to get as diverse and colorful as the community itself.

So let’s take a look at A Fantastic Woman, the Oscar-winning Chilean film about a trans woman dealing with the loss of her partner, and the overwhelming grief and pressure that come with it. While it is a sobering portrait of a trans experience, it also effectively uses surreal imagery to portray the particular moments that Marina is going through. Let’s dive into two of them. 

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Welcome the Academy's Class of 2018!

Chris here. It's that time of year again for Oscar to welcome its new members into the fold. And the class of 2018 is the largest batch of inductees ever: 928, ahead of last year's previous record of 774. Among the names you will find last year's nominees like Daniel Kaluuya, Timothée Chalamet, and The Big Sick's creative duo Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, as well as beloved folks awaiting that first nomination like Melanie Lynskey, Sean Baker, and Ann Dowd.

These invitees (remember, some people do decline to join) show further attempt to diversify the ranks of the Academy across all categories. Should all accept, the Academy membership for women and people of color will both increase towards last year's goal to double both by 2020. One exciting stat is that 9 branches feature more female invitees than male, including actors, documentary, and producers.

The full list is after the jump, so do share the names you are most excited to see! Here's the cast of Big Little Lies adorably celebrating Zoë Kravitz's invitation to kick off the excitement (but there's tons more adorable well-wishing on The Academy's Twitter page):

The cast of #BigLittleLies welcomes the our newest member invitees —including @ZoeKravitz—to the Academy. #WeAreTheAcademy pic.twitter.com/qooOqsnyTk

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) June 25, 2018

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