Cassandra Kulukundis made Academy Awards history Sunday night, becoming the first winner of the Oscar for Best Casting for her work on One Battle After Another at the 98th Academy Awards. The category was introduced this year, making it the Academy’s first new competitive Oscar since Best Animated Feature was added in 2001.
For many moviegoers, casting happens largely behind the scenes. On Sunday night, that quiet but essential part of filmmaking briefly moved into the spotlight. Kulukundis’ win recognized one of the least visible but most important parts of the creative process: the work of assembling a cast that feels believable, alive, and right for the story being told.
Kulukundis won for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, the film that emerged as the biggest winner of the evening with six awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, and the inaugural award for casting.
The film’s ensemble was widely praised as one of its major strengths. Alongside established stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, and Teyana Taylor, Kulukundis also helped bring newcomer Chase Infiniti into a pivotal role. The character required a performer who could hold her own alongside a cast of established actors while carrying several of the film’s most emotionally exposed scenes. After a months-long search and an extended audition process, Infiniti emerged as the actor who could bring that balance of vulnerability and presence to the screen.
Her Oscar win also highlighted a career that has quietly shaped some of the most acclaimed American films of the past two decades. Her casting credits include films such as There Will Be Blood, Her, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, and The Brutalist, projects widely recognized for the strength of their performances as well as their direction.
Kulukundis’ long creative partnership with director Paul Thomas Anderson has become one of the most enduring collaborations in contemporary American cinema. She first worked with Anderson as an intern during the production of his 1996 debut Hard Eight. Over the years she became one of his closest creative collaborators, casting every one of his films since Magnolia and helping shape the distinctive ensemble casts that define his work.
Casting directors rarely receive public attention, but their influence on a film can be enormous. They are often the first to see how different actors might bring a script to life, testing combinations of performers and searching for the subtle chemistry that can transform a scene. In many cases, the tone of an entire film begins to take shape during the casting process.
In her acceptance speech, Kulukundis used the moment to draw attention to the profession itself. She dedicated the award to casting directors who never had the chance to stand on the Oscars stage and thanked the many people in the industry who spent years pushing for the category to be created. She also joked that she had managed to win an Oscar before Anderson did, a line that drew one of the night’s lighter laughs.
Kulukundis’ own background reflects another long tradition of Greek influence in global industries. She comes from the Kulukundis family, a name associated with the shipping networks that connected the island of Kasos in the Dodecanese to ports such as London and New York during the twentieth century. In her case, that legacy of international reach has taken a different form, extending into cinema rather than maritime trade.
What made the moment stand out was not simply that Kulukundis won the first award of its kind. It was that the win recognized a form of creative work audiences experience constantly, even if they do not always notice it by name. Casting often determines whether a film merely looks assembled or truly feels inhabited.
With this first award, the Academy finally acknowledged a craft that has shaped countless films from behind the scenes. Cassandra Kulukundis now holds the distinction of being the first person to represent that work on Hollywood’s biggest stage.