This year’s Academy Awards will include the first-ever Oscar for Achievement in Casting. It’s the first new category in 25 years, since Best Animated Feature was added in 2001 (which inaugural award was won by Shrek).

Casting, though, is seen as kind of an illusive, inscrutable art form. We feel like we can separate out the writing and the editing and the costuming and the directing from a thing. But the cast kind of IS the thing a lot of the time, right? It’s kind of inextricable from the thing, it feels like.

This hour: a look at the art of casting.

GUESTS:

• Mellini Kantayya: An actor and writer and the author of Actor. Writer. Whatever. (essays on my rise to the top of the bottom of the entertainment industry)
• John Frank Levey: A four-time Emmy Award-winning casting director and the author of Right for the Role: Breakdowns, Breakups and Breakthroughs from 35 Years of Casting Iconic TV Shows
• Connor Ratliff: An actor, writer, and comedian and the creator and host of Dead Eyes
• Michael Schulman: A staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears

MUSIC FEATURED (in order):

• Overture – The Producers
• Climbing Uphill – Anna Kendrick
• Everybody Plays the Fool – the Main Ingredient
• Audition – Jethro Tull
• Broadway Baby – Ethel Shutta
• Everything’s Coming Up Roses – Bernadette Peters