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Think of your favorite movie. Maybe you love it for the plot, or the nostalgia you get from watching it again and again. Now think of that same movie, but all the actors have been shuffled: An American who cant quite master a British accent, a 35-year-old playing a high schooler, a dramatic actor whose jokes fall flat. The people who make sure that doesnt happen often go unrecognized, but now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has something to say about it. The inaugural Best Casting Oscar will be awarded at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15. Its the first new Oscars category in more than two decades. (In 2002, Shrek was the first to win the then-recently debuted Best Animated Feature award.) And its a long time coming; there has been a casting branch of the Academy since 2013. But even with the introduction of an Oscar to recognize achievement at (arguably) the highest level of the film industry, those outside the industry might not understand what casting directors do or what good casting looks like. Fast Company talked to a few industry professionals to break down what happens behind closed doors in the casting processand why this new award is a win for unsung heroes across industries in the workforce. Casting the part Think of a film like its own little company that exists for the length of production: The director is at the head, but the casting director is one of the first people brought on to a project after thatmaking them vital to the film, even if they rarely make it to set. Casting is really an integral part of the filmmaking process, Meredith Shea, the Academys chief membership, impact, and industry officer, says. Casting directors collaborate with the directors and producers right after they receive the script from a writer, so they really set the tone for the start of a film. A great casting decision can make a movie a classicthink Heath Ledgers Joker or Sigourney Weaver in Alienbut a bad one can tank it. A films success can be won or lost before the director ever shouts Action! When Naya Hemphill was in college, she wanted to be a director. She got into casting for student films as a way to be close to the preproduction process, but realized she enjoyed casting. It’s always exciting to discover how talent and script can fuse together, says Hemphill, who is now a casting intern with Blumhouse Productions. That fusionor lack thereofmight be what people are referring to when they talk about good versus bad casting. If a film or television show is really well cast, you kind of don’t notice it, says casting director Paul Schnee. Hes worked on 2015s Spotlight with Mark Ruffalo, and with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts for 2013s August: Osage County. Still, some Oscar votersand many moviegoersmight not understand exactly what goes into casting for a film, despite it being such a crucial piece of the projects success. Thats why casting directors may be viewed as one of the many underappreciated, invisible members of a film crewa sentiment possibly underscored by the fact its taken this long to roll out a casting Oscar. Casting is something that we do in private, Schnee says, and so it’s structurally a different kind of creative input. It took three failed attempts to create the casting director-specific branch of the Academy. Once the branch was officially formed, the idea was that eventually we get our category to have, Schnee says. The branch governors and former casting director David Rubin, who served as Academy president from 2019 to 2022, were instrumental in finally securing the award. Behind closed doors The casting process works like this: Actors audition in person or, more often now, send in self-tape auditions. There are callbacks if necessary, and the process repeats until the casting director finds the person for the role. Casting takes place before the rest of production, behind closed doors, making it a more nebulous role to a layperson. Its easy to understand what other crew members do because their impact is visible through elements like makeup or costumes. If you were interviewing a costume designer, for example, he or she could show you some sketches about the evolution of their design, Schnee says. Because we’re dealing with human beings, I can’t show you auditions of people who didn’t get the job. The process also takes a lot of collaboration, often in different locations: Oslo-based casting director Yngvill Kolset Haga worked with New York-based casting director Avy Kaufman on Sentimental Value, which is up for nine Oscars this year. You work towards the same direction even if you’re not in the same room, Haga says. And they often arent in the same room. Because casting directors work in preproduction, they sometimes dont see what happens on setany changes during filming or editing might be complete surprises at the premiere. I was so delighted to see the magic that everyone did, Kaufman says about seeing Sentimental Value after production wrapped. Given that, the new casting Oscar is a great example of how unsung heroes on teams need to be recognized for their contributions, too. Adam Goodman, clinical professor at Northwestern Universitys McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, also directs the Universitys Center for Leadership. He works with executive teams in industry on leadership and teamwork. He says that in teams, there are roles that are perceived to be back in the background, but in fact without [them], the team fails. Appreciating unrecognized team members is crucial to the success of an organization, with surveys suggesting theyd work even harder if they knew they would be recognized. Expressing gratitude for their contributions is an effective management tactic. And in the case of the new casting Oscar, its been a long time coming. It’s long overdue. Ninety-eight years of Oscars, and here we are . . . but better late than never,” Erica A. Hart, a member of the Casting Society’s board of directors, told CBC News. Some of the people up above don’t see us as a craft, let alone a craft that is [deserving] of the Oscar. The cherry on top Long-term improvement to industry culture involves thinking critically about the importance of leadership and teamwork, Goodman says. Part of this involves not underestimating certain team members. When you go back and look at what helps that team perform really well, it turns out that even though the project manager may not have made material contributions to the final work product, without their participation and engagementand, frankly, orchestrationthe team never would have hit the milestones that it needed to hit, he says. Haga is hopeful the conversations about casting that started this year with the awards introduction continue to bring attention to the work. Kaufman has workd with people she says are receptive to her input and others who take credit for it. She calls the recognition the cherry on top. I’m a mother, so I need to make sure my kids know you don’t do something just to [be recognized]; you do it because it’s the best thing to do, Kaufman says. But with the Oscar now accepting casting directors in a different way, I’ll be curious to know how our lives change now that we’re being recognized, she adds. So, we can call you in a year and tell you how it’s looking. The Oscars arent done adding new categories for recognition, either: in 2028, at the 100th annual ceremony, a Best Stunt Design award will debut. Inside the industry, perception on casting directors has shifted over the years, but having an award might just help nonindustry people understand the level of work it takes to cast a film. My grandma, for example, is paying more attention to it now. That could be a combination of because I’m working in it and also because there’s an Oscar for it now, casting intern Hemphill says. But I do think that it will bring more attention to casting in general.
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Unless you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, theres a decent chance youve never heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). Theres also a better than decent chance youve encountered its influence. Every year the consulting firm publishes a massive tech trends report that maps emerging threats, white spaces, and opportunities early enough for companies to act on them. Past editions have flagged shifts around synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI before they entered the mainstream conversation. And some major institutions are clearly paying attention: FTSGs client list includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA. Which makes whats happening onstage inside a Hilton hotel in downtown Austin quite jarring. Clad in a black cloak, FTSG founder and CEO Amy Webb opens her SXSW talk with a mock funeral for the trend report. Somber music fills the ballroom while a slideshow plays behind her. We are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report, Webb told the rhapsodic crowd of roughly 1,500. She wasnt kidding: An anthropomorphic cartoon version of the report appeared first in a hospital delivery room, then at school, then sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower, before eventually arriving where it spent most of its life: the corporate boardroom. In an interview with Fast Company ahead of the talk, Webb is characteristically blunt about the spectacle. As long as we’re killing the thing we’re famous for, why don’t we have some fun with it? The issue, she says, is the format itself. An annual trend report captures only a fleeting moment in a landscape now shifting too quickly to summarize once a year. By the time a massive PDF lands in executives inboxes, parts of it are already outdated. The challenge with that static report is its a snapshot of a moment in time, Webb says. The bottom line is, things are changing incredibly fast. Instead of cataloging trends, Webb now wants companies to focus on what happens when several of them collide. In this years analysis, the most consequential shifts in technology arrive in clusters: AI, energy infrastructure, robotics, biotechnology, and geopolitical competition are smashing together in ways that reshape entire systems. These so-called convergences, the report argues, create structural changes businesses often recognize too late. As Webb put it onstage at SXSW, trends are only the signals. Trend tells you whats changing,” she explained to the crowd. “A convergence tells you whats going to become inevitable. Her framework borrows from meteorology. If trends are individual weather data points, Webb told the SXSW audience, convergences are the storm systems that form when those forces collide. Companies that want to prepare for the future, she argues, need something closer to a storm tracker than a static report. The report outlines several areas where those convergences are already taking shape. One example is what Webb calls the agentic economy. AI systems are getting better at planning and carrying out tasks on their own, which could push the internet away from todays model of search and browsing and toward one built on delegation. Instead of hunting for the best deal or managing subscriptions themselves, people might rely on digital agents to do it automatically. In that world, the companies running those agentsand the infrastructure behind themcould become the new gatekeepers of economic life. Automation, Webb argues, may not arrive as a sudden wave of layoffs so much as a slow erosion of certain jobs, as hiring freezes, attrition, and software gradually absorb office tasks. At the same time, AI tools are increasingly being framed as companions, advisors, and sources of reassurance, raising questions about what happens when people begin turning to software first when they feel stressed or need guidance. Onstage at SXSW, Webb warned that this shift could extend far beyond productivity software. AI systems, she suggested, could increasingly position themselves as, say, therapists and dating coaches. (Imagine smart glasses quietly whispering suggestions in your ear during a romantic dinner.) The risk, then, is that people could become deeply dependent on systems that are ultimately built and governed by profit-driven tech giants. As empowering as that may feel, Webb tells Fast Company, the tradeoff is that you are relinquishing a lot of the agency and decision making capabilities that you had to a system where you dont know why the system is making those decisions. Theres plenty more packed into the reports 157 pages, from polycomputea future where classical, AI, quantum, and biological computing systems operate side by sideto the rise of human augmentation technologies that blur the line between health care and performance optimization. But many of Webbs warnings revolve around a simpler problem: companies often see these shifts coming and still struggle to act. There are two guiding principles in just about every company right now, Webb says. Those two guiding principles are fear and FOMO. Back in the ballroom, the theatrical funeral quickly gave way to something closer to a rally. After the eulogy, Webb implored the audience to stand. Moments later, a University of TexasAustin marching band snaked through the aisles, horns blaring as it marched toward the stage. The room erupted. Attendees laughed, cheered, and raised their phones as Webb pivoted from satire to sermon. Her message, beneath the spectacle, was about so-called creative destruction. Capitalism is like a perpetual storm, Webb told the crowd. To survive the storm you have to recognize that entirely new technologies can make you irrelevant overnight. Webb also used the stage to lob a few criticisms at the AI industry itself. She singled out OpenAI for what she described as inconsistent messaging around surveillance and its Pentagon partnership. Pick a lane, Sam, she said, referring to CEO Sam Altman. But both onstage and in her conversation with Fast Company, Webbs larger warning was about where the technology ecosystem itself is heading. The next internet is being built not for people, she says. Its being built for machines.
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Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies. It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the worlds finest architecture, as weve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is invented in boxy office parks shielded from the street by hedges and parking lots. Tourists who come to see the global epicenter of innovation inevitably leave disappointed. Cupertino, CA. [Photo: Wangkun Jia/Adobe Stock] This disconnect periodically causes a stir on social media. Matthew Yglesias captured the mood of a recent round of X discourse, posting, The tech industry would be so much cooler if it built iconic skyscraper headquarters instead of this lame office park bullshit. How did Silicon Valley end up like this? Its partially the story of a place that came into its own in the mid-to-late 20th century, a time when sprawl was the overriding mandate of American urban planning. But there are actually more particular reasons for Silicon Valleys architectural identity, rooted in the tech industrys history and ideology. Stanford Research Park (then called Stanford Industrial Park), 1955. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Research Park inc. In 1953, Stanford University and the city of Palo Alto opened a new joint development about a mile from campus called Stanford Industrial Park. The university marketed the complex as a hub for smokeless industry, where university affiliates could commercialize their cutting-edge research. It was immediately an enormous success, incubating Silicon Valley giants like Varian Associates and Hewlett-Packard, and later, Meta and Tesla. The first building in Stanford Research Park, Varian Associates, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Stanford Research Park, as it’s now known, is a fairly ordinary-looking office park to contemporary eyes. But at the time of its construction, there was nothing like it in the world. Its design reflected its identity as a fusion of the university, the factory, and the corporate office, Louise Mozingo writes in the book Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Stanford Research Park employed modernist architectural principles dictating the arrangement and spacing of buildings. The office parks developers were required to leave more than half of the land area as open space, and to establish 90-foot landscaped buffers separating buildings from surrounding streets, much like the rules governing tower-in-the-green-style housing projects going up in central cities. Stanford Research Parks zoning rules were based on earlier policies enacted by the neighboring city of Menlo Park in its Administrative, Professional, Executive, and Research zone in 1948. This was the ur-code for office park zoning, mandating strictly limited lot coverage, large lot sizes, generous parking requirements, and banning noxious industrial processes. Silicon Valley may have pioneered the economic and regulatory frameworks for office park development across the U.S., but it did so with a local flavor. Varian Associates main entrance, 1953. [Photo: courtesy Stanford University] Unlike the corporate estates that companies like General Motors and Bell Labs were building concurrently east of the Mississippi, early Silicon Valley office campuses lacked fancy executive wings. At Hewlett-Packards Stanford Research Park offices, open, non-hierarchical floorplans enabled executives to practice management by walking around. Facebook (now Meta) would follow the same principles in its early years, situating C-suite brass among mid-level associates, as depicted in The Social Network. This layout is meant to stimulate creative thinking by creating chance encounters between workers from different departments. Silicon Valley firms also had a special proclivity for utilitarian architecture. While blue chip industrial giantsbuilt palatial, starchitect-designed campusesthink of Bell Labs reflective obsidian block featured on Severanceto signal their power and permanence, rising Silicon Valley firms had more low-key taste. This has, at times, been ascribed to the poor design sensibilities of the nerdy engineers who ran these firms. Why waste money on expensive frills when the firm is ruthlessly focused on innovation and growth? But a disinterest in architecture may have reflected deeper priorities. In an essay called, The Virtual Architecture of Silicon Valley, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright notes that the buildings of the area have remained resolutely bland, superficial, and ephemeral. This may in fact signal not mere cheapness but also an alternative aesthetic, as yet unarticulated: a self-conscious aversion to architectural representations of hierarchy, stability, and technological permanence. Working at the frontiers of technology and economic transformation, Silicon Valley companies needed highly adaptable workplaces. Venture capital infusions could necessitate rapid upscaling; market crashes meant rapid downscaling. Companies that had disrupted existing industries were wary of their own disruption, and made workplace decisions accordingly. Silicon Valley is littered with hermit crab shellsold office parks that have housed multiple generations of next big things. Alphabets Mountain View headquarters was built for Silicon Graphics. Metas Menlo Park campus was once home to Sun Microsystems. Apple Park [Photo: Zenstratus/Adobe Stock] Future aesthetic As the current crop of Silicon Valley titans have grown into trillion-dollar businesses, their corporate architecture has evolved to reflect their wealth, power, and, its hoped, permanence. Apple Park, a perfectly circular ring designed by Lord Norman Foster in consultation with Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, is a blast from the future, successfully delivering on its promise to translate Apples product design aesthetic into architecture. Meta Menlo Park [Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency] Not to be outdone, Meta and Alphabet subsequently brought on Frank Gehry and Bjarke Ingalls to design portions of their campuses. Next up is Nvidia, which hired Gensler to create a pair of canopied mega-structures sheltering multiple interior office blocks at its rapidly expanding Santa Clara campus. Thanks to these projects, Silicon Valley is gaining an architectural identity. But it remains a private, primarily virtual architecture. Silicon Valleys architectural achievements are canceled out by its urbanistic deficiencies. Besides the employees and business partners who are permitted on campus, few others will regularly see these buildings in person, and virtually none will regularly see them on foot. They are mainly designed to be viewed from the middle distance in photos and videos, offering a glitzy visual shorthand for the companies that call them home. Nvidia Headquarters [Photo: PhotoSpirit/Adobe Stock] Unlike a downtown office tower, these campuses will never be experienced by masses of passerby. They will never be civic landmarks in the way of the Transamerica Pyramid or the Chrysler Building. Theyre all on their own, not characters in a vibrant urban scene. If Apple ever goes the way of Chrysler, or Nvidia pulls a Transamerica, their campuses will become hermit crab shells themselvesbig, weird hermit crab shells.
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