/Entertainment

Hanks is right on the main point, but wrong on the diagnosis. The problem isn't a missing category. It's that Academy voters have never been able to separate "performance" from "physical presence." The unspoken logic is: if I can't see the actor on screen, how do I evaluate what they did? It's a visibility bias, not a merit one. The Andy Serkis example is perfect, but also the most convenient for the argument, because he uses motion capture, meaning there's a body, a face, something "visible" for voters to anchor on. A pure voice actor, with no associated image, would still be overlooked in the existing categories, not for lack of quality, but because the voting system favors what's easy to remember and easy to picture. The real question is whether the Oscars will keep rewarding performance or keep rewarding *appearance*. Until that distinction is clarified, the debate over separate versus integrated categories is secondary.