On Tuesday, the New York Times published a feature entitled “When Casting Goes Wrong.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science has added an Oscar for Best Casting this year, so the Times decided to celebrate by… calling on readers to vote in a poll about casting directors being terrible at their jobs? There may be a war going on in Iran, but it’s important that we make space to take Blake Lively to task for a movie she was kind of bad in fifteen years ago.

14 of the Worst Movie Casting Choices - The New York Times

A new Oscar celebrates the process of matching actor and role. But whether a star is hired for artistic or box office reasons, mismatches can be memorable. Here our favorites from recent decades. What do you think?

The thing is… they seem to fundamentally not understand what casting is? Or the difference between “this person is miscast” and “we don’t like this actor’s performance.” And yet… these same people are paid for their expert opinion.

^{Pay me for my expert opinion instead!}

Let’s start with the capsule explaining why all the actors in House of Gucci were poorly cast:

In the too-long “House of Gucci” with Al Pacino, Lady Gaga, Adam Driver and Jared Leto, among others, each star seems to be operating solo in their own hyped-up opera. That’s great for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, not so much for a drama.

Casting Jared Leto is always a mistake. I’ll give them that. But that has less to do with his abilities as an actor, and more to do with the whole “preying on underage girls” and “starting a cult” thing.¹ But everyone else? They haven’t started cults. If it’s true that each actor is disastrously hamming it up (haven’t seen it), that’s Ridley Scott’s fault. The director is in charge of, follow my logic here, directing the actors. They are also responsible for aligning all of the performances to the desired tone. Maybe the operatic style was an intentional artistic choice? If so, why would casting anyone else make any difference?

(Also: why the snide “too-long” diss? What does that have to do with your argument? Focus!)

Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson catches strays for… acting like a normal person?

It’s not that Robert Pattinson didn’t do right by the role of “oblivious regular guy whose wife is descending into madness” in “Die My Love,” it’s that it didn’t need to be him: He’s far better suited to play a character on the brink instead of opposite one.

“You performed the role to our satisfaction, but it was a waste of your time” is a pretty entitled take! Critics: your job is not to decide what artists “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing with their talent. Your job is to evaluate the work they choose to do. Period. Robert Pattinson has proven his taste for both interesting material and cool-as-hell collaborators time and time again. Perhaps instead of portraying another kooky weirdo, he wanted to, I don’t know, try something different? Challenge himself? Maybe taking the role was just an excuse to work with Lynne Ramsay. Which would be a completely valid reason!

In the category of lazy misogyny, you’ve got Daisy Edgar-Jones lambasted for being unable to find her character’s “emotional core” (as if she betrayed the piece of high literature that was the Twisters screenplay), Paul Mescal derided for being too much of a beta cuck in Gladiator II (being unable to hold one’s own against Denzel would apply to 99% of actors, btw), and Leo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz blamed for turning Gangs of New York into a “romantic-comedy” (the harshest insult imaginable to film bros). Even whining about a Pattinson performance feels like an unfortunate throwback to dismissing Twilight because it was something tween girls liked.

In a subtler vein of hating things that are female-coded (throw in some fat shaming too), the Times is angry that Jack Black is A) a goddamn national treasure and B) box office gold. You see, the issue with Jack Black is: he’s an unproblematic, charming goofball who isn’t hyper-masculine or ashamed of how he looks. That’s why, not only is he bad in King Kong (“exaggerated mannerisms” in a King Kong remake?? good heavens I think I’ve got the vapours!), they also needlessly drag him for The Holiday². Like almost all of these other choices, it’s all so boring and predictable.

The Times managed to save the worst for last. And you do, under the circumstances, gotta hand it to them. Firstly, this one was not predictable (because it’s batshit crazy). And secondly, they definitely know what they’re doing over there when it comes to driving reader engagement. I try my best not to succumb to bad faith arguments, but I’m only human. You come after Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, you and me are going to have words.

Bold choice to pair your reasoning with a video of, inarguably, one of the most iconic movie scenes of the 21st century. A scene where the actor takes “checking your email” to transcendent levels of heartbreak. Plenty of people don’t like Interstellar. They think the “love is the 4th dimension” stuff is stupid. They think it has too many endings. But I have never once heard the main complaint be “Matthew McConaughey is bad in it.” In fact, my argument would be that Interstellar, a movie I consider to be a total masterpiece, only works because of him. He brings the heart and soul into Nolan’s brutalist, temporally brain-bending math equation of a story—and it’s the push and pull of the two that sparks genius.

Ultimately, what was the point of publishing this poll? It is mean-spirted and downright ignorant (even the one I nominally agree with, Tom Hanks’s turn as a goblin in Elvis, is not bad casting! he just made bad choices! and Baz let him! bad casting would be something akin to “Michael Cera as a grizzled cop”… and even that, I’d actually be interested in seeing!). Maybe the fact that I wrote this whole rebuttal answers my own question: the shameless clickbait worked. Let’s end with some positivity…

The Oscars are this Sunday. Up for the inaugural “Achievement in Casting” award are:

Hamnet, Nina Gold
Marty Supreme, Jennifer Venditti
One Battle After Another, Cassandra Kulukundis
The Secret Agent, Gabriel Domingues
Sinners, Francine Maisler

My vote would be for Nina Gold and Hamnet. Not only does the movie include the performance of the year (Jessie Buckley as Agnes Shakespeare), it also features one of the best child actor performances in recent memory (Jacobi Jupe, as the titlular Hamnet), as well as a very clever use of meta-casting with his older brother Noah (as the stage actor who plays Hamlet in the film’s final act). But Francine Maisler and Sinners is a close second, just for the discovery of Miles Caton alone—not to mention the rest of the ensemble.