The 50-year struggle to get Best Casting into the Oscars

The Academy Award for Best Casting is the first new category to be added the Oscars in more than two decades. | Emma McIntyre/WireImage

On Sunday night, the Academy Awards will confer their first trophy to a casting director. The award for Best Casting is the first new category to be added to the Oscars in 24 years — and it’s doing its part to remedy the Oscars’s abysmal record on gender.

Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, 82.2 percent of winners have been men, with women making...