Oscars 2025: Why people claim Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldaña and Ariana Grande's nominations are 'category fraud'

Among the many controversies of this year's Oscars race, some believe that favourites to take home the acting awards have been recognised in the wrong category.

This year's race to the Oscars has been shockingly chaotic and vitriolic, with one actor's history of bigoted social media posts and two directors' use of AI being revealed, and plenty of gossip about who is behind all this revealing. Another contentious topic has been "category fraud" – that is, the phenomenon of actors being nominated in categories where many believe they don't really belong. "Absolute category fraud" said one X , of Kieran Culkin's best ing actor nod for A Real Pain. "It's time to stop the category fraud madness," said another, referring to both Culkin and Zoe Saldaña's ing actress nomination for Emilia Pérez. And there are many more posts like these. Kyle Wilson said in a piece for The Ringer in November that this was poised to be "the fraudiest awards season in Oscar history".

Still, we shouldn't get carried away. No one is accusing anyone else of committing actual fraud. The practice they're talking about is simply a long-established way of boosting actors' chances of winning an Academy Award (or a Bafta or a Golden Globe), by placing one co-lead in a lead acting category and the other into the ing, rather than have them compete against each other. Nate Jones in Vulture has called it an "understandable bit of gamesmanship". But Michael Schulman, the author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears, tells the BBC that "category fraud is particularly egregious this year".

The films being criticised are the aforementioned Emilia Pérez and A Real Pain, plus Wicked, all of which are on the shortlist for Best picture. All three films are dominated by pairs of actors of the same gender who have almost equal amounts to do, rather than playing lead roles and ing roles. For instance, when Wicked was a Broadway show, the actresses playing Elphaba and Galinda, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, were both nominated for the Tony award for Best actress in a musical, so it would seem logical that the actresses playing Elphaba and Galinda in the big-screen adaptation, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, should both be in the running for best actress prizes. But that's not what has happened. At the Oscars and the Baftas, Erivo has been nominated as a lead actress, and Grande as a ing actress.

Some say the categories occupied by the two stars of Emilia Pérez are even more questionable. The film divides its time between characters played by Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón – and according to Matthew Stewart, who has crunched the numbers for Screen Time Central, Saldaña is on screen and/or on the soundtrack for 57 minutes and 50 seconds, or 43.69% of the film, which is slightly more than Gascón's 52 minutes and 21 seconds, or 39.54%. And yet it is Gascón who has been nominated for a lead actress Oscar and Bafta, and Saldaña who is on the "ing" shortlist.

But the alleged "category fraud" that is really getting film journalists and social-media commentators hot under the collar pertains to Culkin in A Real Pain. Stewart has calculated that the film's writer/director, Jesse Eisenberg has more screen time (62 minutes and 29 seconds) than Culkin does (58 minutes and six seconds), but the film is obviously about the relationship between two cousins who are almost always on screen together. They are as much co-leads as Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon were in Thelma & Louise – and yet while Davis and Sarandon were both shortlisted for best actress Oscars in 1992, Culkin has been nominated as best ing actor at the Oscars and the Baftas alike. Last year, Culkin took home the Golden Globe for Best performance by a male actor in a television series – drama for his portrayal of Succession's Roman Roy – he was up against his onscreen brother Jeremy Strong in the same category.

"There are no official rules delineating a lead versus ing performance, and Academy can vote however they want," says Schulman. "In practice, though, the actors and the studios choose how to position the cast, through 'For Your Consideration' ads and the like. The positioning is often strategic, so that two co-stars aren't splitting the vote, or so a semi-lead can cannonball into the ing race." It's worth recalling that neither Davis nor Sarandon won an Oscar for Thelma & Louise, so the fact that they were up against each other may indeed have split the vote. In contrast, Saldaña and Grande have been put into different categories from their co-stars, and they are the current top two favourites to win the best ing actress prize. Meanwhile, Culkin – "a semi-lead", to use Schulman's phrase – is a dead cert to win an Academy Award for best ing actor. If he had been on the leading actor list, up against Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet and Ralph Fiennes, his chances of taking home a statuette would have been a lot smaller. The BBC ed both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Bafta regarding the issue of "category fraud", as well representatives of the three films in question, Emilia Pérez, A Real Pain and Wicked, but all of them are yet to respond.

Some commentators see "category fraud" as out-and-out cheating: the equivalent of entering a Great Dane in a contest to find the world's biggest Chihuahua. But is it really so insidious? Charles Gant, the awards editor of Screen International, its that he has "sympathy" for studios that push actors towards one category or another. "Why wouldn't Universal, Netflix and Searchlight Pictures try to split their actors into leading and ing categories," he asks. "Anybody would." He also notes that Ampas in the US and Bafta in the UK: "are not obliged to play ball" – just because a studio s someone as a leading or ing performer doesn't mean that voters have to agree.

The most bizarre instance of voters going their own way came in 2021, when Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield were co-leads in Judas and the Black Messiah. Stanfield was marketed as the lead, and Kaluuya as a ing actor, and yet, somehow, both men ended up being Oscar-nominated for best ing actor. In this instance, the two competing nominations didn't split the vote, and Kaluuya won the Academy Award – but who exactly either performer was meant to be ing was never explained.

The trouble stems from how difficult it is to say what constitutes a "ing" role. "The word 'ing' often feels inadequate to define a performance," says Rich Cline, the chair of the London Film Critics' Circle, "so it's used across a very wide range, from ensemble casts to people who are onscreen throughout a film, like Ariana Grande in Wicked, to someone who comes on briefly and delivers a devastating moment, like Isabella Rossellini in Conclave."

Some journalists argue that timings should be involved – eg, an actor should have to appear in more than half of a film to be its lead, and less than half of a film to be a ing player. Others maintain that the distinction between categories depends on more subtle and artistic factors, such as which character evolves the most during the narrative, and whose perspective is prioritised. "Grande, Saldaña and Culkin are all in movies that centre on a pair of characters who share more or less equal screen time," says Schulman, "but the protagonists of their films – the ones who go through the pivotal emotional journey – are played by Erivo, Gascón, and Eisenberg. Can you really decide who a story is about by using a stopwatch">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });