text: The 88th awards ceremony became the target of a boycott, popularized on social media with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, based on activists' perception that its all-white acting nominee list reflected bias.In response, the Academy initiated "historic" changes in membership by 2020.Some media critics claim the Academy's efforts to address its purported racial, gender and national biases are merely distractions.By contrast, the Golden Globe Awards already have multiple winners of Asian descent in leading actress categories.Some question whether the Academy's definition of "merit" is just or empowering for non-Americans.Miscategorization of actors The Academy doesn't have any rules for how to categorize whether a performance is leading or supporting, and it is up to the discretion of the studios whether a given performance is submitted for either Best Actor/Actress or Best Supporting Actor/Actress.This has led situations where a film has two or more co-leads, and one of these is submitted in a supporting category to avoid the two leads competing against each other, and to increase the film's chances of winning.This practice has been derisively called "category fraud".For example, Rooney Mara was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Carol (2015), despite her having a comparable amount of screentime to Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for Best Actress.Another example is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), where Brad Pitt was nominated for and won Best Supporting Actor, even though he played an equally important role to Best Actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio.In both these cases, critics argued that The Weinstein Company, the studio behind the former film, had placed someone who was actually a leading actor or actress into the supporting categories to avoid them competing against their co-lead.