Oscars 2026: Category Fraud And Reshuffling Narratives For Winning

Every award season is habitually accompanied with dispute over acting category designation. Distributors and award strategists often hurl leading performances into supporting and vice versa to steer Oscar chances. The lines have increasingly been blurred to serve convenient agenda. Massive campaigns reflect desperate lobbying for award buzz, haggling over and contesting screentime, visibility and alleged career traction. Several factors prop up vis-à-vis positioning, what stage the chosen actor is in, ensemble considerations, business tactics and critical leverage to propel award bets. Of course, there can be no pretensions regarding the suspect equitableness and transparency of an award race. It’s not a level playing field. However, the supporting performances categories exemplify the worst, greediest and skewed habits of conferring honours and recognition.

For years, studios have played foul, tinkering with familiar image and foisting new perceptions. Performances are reconfigured and reimagined across categories, planted away from conventional expectation in a dubious, backhanded manner. It’s a classic case of swindling the more deserving contenders, who don’t get a chance to vie in a purer sense. When Warner Bros. was pushing Warren Beatty in the Supporting Actor race for Splendor in the Grass (1961), Beatty publicly called out the move: “I think it is unfair for any actor who plays a lead role to compete, or attempt to compete, with other actors who did supporting roles. For this reason, I refused when Warner Bros. asked to put me in the supporting category…but they went ahead and did it anyway. Then my representative asked the Academy to cross my name off the list, and they said it was too late…I think it would be unfair if I were nominated in a supporting role.” Narratives are engineered also to steer the film and respective studio’s cumulative winning chances. Unfair demarcations are chalked out; a neat matrix for winning established. Two co-leads with nominations are believed to result in instances of splitting the vote and rodeoing any win at all.

The litany of examples is wide-ranging. This stretches back to the 1970s, when The Godfather’s (1973) Al Pacino was nominated for supporting instead of lead, even though his evolution is central to the film’s narrative arc. Some of the most recent glaring manipulations happened last year. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Michael Schulman has covered the Oscars since 2017—not as a film critic or industry insider, but as a documentarian of Hollywood’s most elaborately staged event. Speaking to The Observer in 2025, Schulman asserted, “Adrien Brody is going to win Best Actor. Demi Moore has a good chance for Best Actress, but I’m not 100% sure. The supporting categories seem like a lock for Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin—but both are category fraud, because they’re actually co-leads in their movies.” Zoe Saldaña, who won Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez (2024), is very much at the forefront of the brash musical. She plays Rita, a lawyer aiding the drug cartel boss Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) in faking her death and a gender-affirming surgery. Saldaña stays throughout, even as her Rita gets far more enmeshed in uncovering Mexico’s unreported dead. Her screentime is close to Gascón. It’s her story we follow, within which Emilia begins to command formidable authority.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg play parallel leads in A Real Pain (2024), a witty drama around cousins revisiting historical and familial trauma. In fact, Culkin’s Benji drives much of the conversation, charming his way through strangers only to reveal in flashes a deep recess of anguish. He wants to express and unload it all. But the bid to connect ends in being seen as a constant sport, instead of someone who’s keeping a lot within. Funnily enough, Culkin, who swept the Supporting Actor race right through the Oscars, had more screentime than best actor victor The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody.

The 2016 awards were a similarly contentious lot, driving ample controversy, dovetailing Alicia Vikander and Rooney Mara. For the Todd Haynes film Carol (2015), the latter was pushed by the distributor, The Weinstein Co., in the Supporting Actress race, despite being the lead alongside Cate Blanchett. In an October 2015 interview with The New York Times, Mara confessed being displeased with the decision. She won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated at the Golden Globes as a lead along with Blanchett. Eventually, she landed in the Oscar slot for Supporting Actress at the distributor’s behest. Historically, both co-leads have netted nominations only sparingly, notable ones being Terms of Endearment (1983) and Thelma & Louise (1991). One of the most egregious switches happened in 2016 when Alicia Vikander—whose character in The Danish Girl (2015) had as much of a point of view as Eddie Redmayne—was instead nominated in the Supporting Actress category and won.

The studio scramble to seal nominations for all its leads does pay off at times, bypassing role-driven mathematics. Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) brought Olivia Colman a Best Actress win and Supporting Actress nods for Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. However, it’s Stone’s Abigail who serves our entry into Queen Anne’s public and private chambers in the wickedly twisted, tragicomic drama. Abigail’s journey, from seeking to be the favourite to being the one whose affection and attention are coveted, underpins the film. Stone, who literally essays the character morphing into the titular favourite, was shunted by Searchlight Pictures to the Supporting category for ensuring the film’s trio of actresses individually get acknowledged. Occasionally, studios play around with categories to prevent actors and actresses competing with themselves. In 2009, Kate Winslet had leading roles in two films from different studios, Revolutionary Road and The Reader, but was pitched in "For Your Consideration" ads as a leading actress for the former, and a supporting actress for the latter. However, while the Golden Globes nominated her as supporting actress in a drama for The Reader and leading actress in a drama for Revolutionary Road, bestowing both prizes on the night, BAFTA and Oscar resisted. Both said that she had a lead role in The Reader, and she went on to pick the Oscar for Best Actress for it.

In a welcome change, this year has been exceptional with the Supporting Actress category justifiably earning its stripe. Each nominated actress, from One Battle After Another’s (2025) Teyana Taylor to Weapons’ (2025) Amy Madigan, show up for brief, utterly arresting passages and haunt the entire film the minute they recede. Taylor opens the Paul Thomas Anderson film in a fiery blaze and disappears soon, once the film leaps in time. However, it’s her indomitable spirit that carries over from the prologue into the rest of the film. Likewise, Weapons builds up to Madigan’s appearance via disturbing premonitions and dreams. Cumulatively, she’s not even in the film more than fourteen minutes—but the film rests entirely on her seismically unpredictable energy. The precursor awards have toggled between Taylor, Madigan and Sinners’ Wunmi Mosaku. Regardless, whoever triumphs on Oscar night wouldn’t at least have to deal with category fraud insinuations.