Slowly but surely, the Academy Awards voting body has challenged itself to expand its horizons beyond the usual suspects. The last few years have seen nominations and wins for hugely deserving films that would have been considered a bit too fringe in the past. Yet there is one group of people that is still largely overlooked by the Oscars.
Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone became the first Native American Best Actress nominee following the announcement of the 96th Oscars nominations on Jan. 23, 2024 — an incredible statistic that is both a sign of the times and shockingly overdue. Elsewhere in the list of nods, other great signs of improvement include three films directed by women that are up for Best Picture, the highest number in the history of the ceremony, even if only one, Justine Triet, was additionally nominated for Best Director.
That’s all great news, but one category this year made it glaringly obvious that the Academy, while finally considering different voices and talents as worthy of its attention, is still largely unwelcoming of young folk. There’s a lot more at play than just performance when it comes to picking Oscar nominees and winners. There’s a certain level of prestige and veteran experience that factors into the voters’ picks, which is a big reason why the same familiar faces tend to show up in all the categories every year, even when they’re not expected to win.
The disappointing ageism in the Best Supporting Actor category at the 2024 Oscars
Charles Melton won myriad awards from critics and other associations in the lead-up to the awards season’s big conclusion at the Oscars. Everyone who was stunned by the ex-Riverdale actor’s sublime turn in Todd Haynes’ May December began raising their hopes that someone with such an unexpected path to award buzz could actually go all the way and deliver what would be one of the most refreshing wins in Academy history.
Then, in a shocking turn of events, Melton was ignored by both the SAG awards and the BAFTAs, not even making it to the list of nominees. The Oscars followed suit, and the 33-year-old was nowhere to be seen. Nominated for Best Supporting Actor were 80-year-old Robert DeNiro, 58-year-old Robert Downey Jr., 43-year-old Ryan Gosling, 47-year-old Sterling K. Brown, and 56-year-old Mark Ruffalo. A worthy, star-studded line-up, including an exciting first Oscar nod for Brown, whose acting chops have been mostly reserved for television. Yet, we dare say, Melton could easily substitute any of these nominees, and make a fantastic winner, too.
And his wasn’t the only impactful performance by a young man deserving of recognition by the film industry’s biggest prize. Two-thirds of The Holdovers‘ magnificent trio received nods from the Academy, with the exception of its 21-year-old breakout star, Dominic Sessa, who pulled his weight among acting heavy-weights, stealing many of the film’s scenes. In the same vein, 15-year-old Milo Machado Graner had one of the year’s best turns in Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall but was sidelined into “Youth” categories throughout awards season.
The Academy’s history of underestimating young talent
There appears to be an unspoken rule among award voters that winners and nominees must “work for” their honors, resulting in too many career winners, whose performances weren’t even the year’s best, but their victory was just a long time coming.
As Twitter user @Harry_W25 eloquently put it, “The Academy is stuck in a rut where it won’t award the performances of younger, deserving actors because it must compensate for older actors who they didn’t award when they were young.”
In recent years, film fans and analysts have pointed towards the likes of The Fabelmans‘ Gabriel LaBelle, The Florida Project‘s Brooklynn Prince, Room‘s Jacob Tremblay, West Side Story‘s Rachel Zegler, among others, as examples of budding talent that the Academy is too apprehensive to recognize, supposedly for lack of more “proof” of their talent elsewhere, or simply because nominating children when veterans are also in the race is considered too big a swing. We disagree and so does multiple award-winning actress Frances McDormand.
Even when they are nominated, they rarely ever win. 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis became the youngest person to ever be nominated for Best Actress in 2013 for her crushing work in Beasts of the Southern Wild but lost to Jennifer Lawrence. Many believed a 21-year-old Timothée Chalamet was the deserving Best Actor winner at the 2017 Oscars, only for him to lose to Gary Oldman. Just last year, in what will go down in history as one of the most confounding wins ever, Jamie Lee Curtis took home the golden statuette for Best Supporting Actress when she wasn’t even the best supporting actress in the film she was nominated for (Stephanie Hsu, most would agree, was the deserving victor). And the list goes on.
Yet, it’s not that simple…
Marlee Martin holds the record for youngest Best Actress winner, after her 1987 win at 21, taking over for 22-year-old Janet Gaynor who held the record for 58 years. But it’s the men’s category that makes the discrepancy unavoidably obvious, because, quoting Twitter user @Ivystan23 “Academy don’t love young actors and old actresses. They prefer old actors and young actresses.”
The numbers back up this statement. A Chicago Tribune study of the average age of Oscar nominees and winners from 2013 revealed that “female Oscar winners skew nearly a decade younger than their male counterparts.” A similar analysis conducted by The Guardian in 2019 concluded that “The average age of the best actor winner was 44, while the average for best actress was 36.” Furthermore, “Adrien Brody is the only best actor under 30, winning for his role in The Pianist in 2002; by contrast, 32 actresses have won the equivalent prize in their 20s.”
That’s not to say that the Oscars recognize young talent just because they recognize young women. While it is changing, it’s a fact that women tend to stop getting full-fledged roles at a certain age, whereas for men, that’s when they get their best opportunities. The result is a frustrating cocktail of lack of recognition and absence of opportunity that transcends the Academy. Can this change? Seeing the decades it took the Academy to make minor fixes to its other errors, “soon enough” would be harboring a pointless pipe dream.