Editing Academy Awards (section)

=== Miscategorization of actors ===
{{See also|Carol (film)#Oscar category}}

The Academy has no rules for how to categorize whether a performance is leading or supporting, and it is up to the discretion of the studios whether a given performance is submitted for either Best Actor/Actress or Best Supporting Actor/Actress. This has led to situations where a film has two or more co-leads, and one of these is submitted in a supporting category to avoid the two leads competing against each other, and to increase the film's chances of winning. This practice has been derisively called "category fraud".<ref name="liveabout_com">{{cite web |url=https://www.liveabout.com/difference-between-lead-and-supporting-actor-2428097 |title=How Lead and Supporting Actor Oscars Are Determined |access-date=March 17, 2023 |archive-date=December 9, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221209195446/https://www.liveabout.com/difference-between-lead-and-supporting-actor-2428097 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="polygon_com">{{cite web |url=https://www.polygon.com/22399802/oscars-category-controversy |title=The Oscars need to fix the Supporting Actor category |website=[[Polygon (website)|Polygon]] |date=April 25, 2021 |access-date=March 17, 2023 |archive-date=October 21, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221021002529/https://www.polygon.com/22399802/oscars-category-controversy |url-status=live}}</ref>

For example, [[Rooney Mara]] was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for ''[[Carol (film)|Carol]]'' (2015), despite her having a comparable amount of screentime to [[Cate Blanchett]], who was nominated for Best Actress. Another example is ''[[Once Upon a Time in Hollywood]]'' (2019), where [[Brad Pitt]] was nominated for and won Best Supporting Actor, even though he played an equally important role to Best Actor nominee [[Leonardo DiCaprio]]. In both these cases, critics argued that the studios behind the films had placed someone who was actually a leading actor or actress into the supporting categories to avoid them competing against their co-lead.<ref name="liveabout_com"/><ref name="polygon_com"/>