An Artios, Not an Oscar, For Casting

The Emmys won’t be the first entertainment awards ceremony held after the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. This Thursday, the Casting Society of America is presenting the 17th annual Artios Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

One might wonder ... awards for casting? How hard can it be? That’s a common question even in Hollywood, one the group has sought to answer. If you’ve ever had to get the unanimous consent of a committee, you get a rough idea of what casting directors go through.

The society created the Artios Awards, says organization president Mary V. Buck, “because nobody else at the time was paying attention to us. We are an integral part of every project. Artios is Greek meaning perfectly fitted, which is why we picked that name, because that is truly how we all feel. The times when you put a group together that you believe really is perfect from top to bottom: Those are really special moments in casting.”

For Thursday’s show, Kevin Costner, Martin Short, Rob Lowe and Jeff Goldblum are among the scheduled presenters. Wayne Brady of “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” is the emcee.

The event will have a vastly more sedate tone than planned.

“We are arranging for security,” says Buck. She also plans to call for a moment of silence at the beginning of the show.

“We will also talk about what is happening--the fact that people have lost loves ones and family members and friends, that we have lost our sense of safety and in some cases our livelihood. What I need to say is that hopefully we have pulled together as a nation and we can, hopefully, continue to pull together as well as an industry and a business. We have had [awards] nights that have been really bawdy and other nights that have been pretty staid. I definitely have a feeling this will be much more staid.”

Awards will be presented in 15 categories, including feature film-drama, feature film-comedy, feature film-independent, television movie of the week, miniseries, dramatic episodic and comedy episodic. Costner will hand out a special award to producer-director Wallis Nicita, a former casting director, and Short will present a Career Achievement Award to producer and personal manager Bernie Brillstein.

Buck has been casting since 1976; for the last 18 years, she and her partner, Susan Edelman, have concentrated on pilots and TV movies. “We did the pilot for ‘The Wonder Years,’ ‘Malcolm in the Middle,’ ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Party of Five.”’ This year they are nominated for an Emmy and an Artios for the miniseries, “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.”

Gaining recognition in Hollywood for their work has been an uphill climb for casting directors, Buck says, primarily because they don’t make the final decisions. “The director makes them or the producer makes them,” Buck says. “In the case of television pilots and projects, the network has a great deal to say in who is going to be the actor for a particular part. I think there has always been some sort of prejudice toward that. Why should we be awarded for something that is basically a ‘committee rule?”’

Another drawback, says Buck, is that there is a prevailing attitude that anybody has the ability to cast. That assumption, Buck says, is far from true.

“I actually think what we do--and this isn’t a swipe at all at anybody who is doing costumes, I think what they do is brilliant in most cases--but it is much easier for me to go out and go shopping and pick something off a rack and bring it in and hope it works than it is to be told over and over again, continue to keep looking for this actor, continue to keep finding a body that will work. It is a much harder job. You have to deal with agents and managers. If the star in the show has casting approval, then that is another voice we have to listen to.”

For eight years, casting directors have been eligible for Emmys. “We went on a campaign 10 years ago to try to get the TV academy to recognize us,” she says. “It took 2 1/2 years, I think, to do it. We really had to explain to them and show them exactly what we do and what our value is. We always like to say that most of the time, if you are watching a show, you are watching because you like the actors in a show. We are the people who put those actors on the screen. We did three or four different presentations to the board of governors.”

The organization is lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to add the category to the Oscars. Last year, a committee made its most recent presentation to the academy’sgovernors. “We got a letter three months later that in all the years they have been approached [about Oscar] categories, the group gave the absolute best presentation, but they are not prepared [to add one], nor do they feel we deserve an Academy Award.”

“Our board of governors has several times in the last decade reviewed the notion of presenting an Academy Award for casting and the board, on each of those occasions, felt it wasn’t appropriate,” says a spokesperson for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, adding that the society’s request isn’t the only one the board has deemed not appropriate.

The academy, says Buck, did invite them to apply again. “We were a little thrown [by the rejection], but we are going to do our best to [reapply]. We invited the board of governors to come to the Artios dinner this year so they can see that side of us and what we do.”