New Academy Members List: Surprises, Snubs & Shifting Power
As the voting body tops 10,000, I look at what the new 534 invitees mean for next year's nominees. Plus: Decoding the early TIFF announcements
If you are reading this newsletter and are among the 534 people invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year, congratulations! If you’re looking for a date to the Governors Awards, please know that I am available!
And you might want to stay tuned, because in today’s special hybrid of a newsletter, Christopher Rosen and I hopped on Substack Live to dig into the list of new members, speculate on how they might shift the Academy’s demographics, and how this news fits in with the Academy’s slew of announcements in the past few weeks. We also get into the first five films announced as world premieres at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival — a small preview of the deluge of festival announcements about to hit in late July.
As Chris and I discuss, several of these invitations are what we see every year, with breakthrough talents who were either first-time nominees or winners invited even further into the club. It’s no surprise that best actress winner Mikey Madison or Flow director Gints Zilbalodis were not previously Academy members; it’s a bit more surprising that Kieran Culkin, who has been acting since he was a child, won an Oscar before becoming an Academy member himself. According to the Academy, there are 26 previous Oscar winners in this group overall.
This class of 534 is by far the biggest since 2020, and according to demographic information shared by the Academy, it continues the group’s goal of diversifying its ranks. Forty-one percent are women, 45 percent belong to underrepresented communities and fully 55 percent come from outside the United States. Of all the changes that have occurred with the Academy over the past decade, its international expansion has been by far the most influential on the winners and nominees, and this year’s class will do nothing to disabuse that notion. Remembering that international auteurs like China’s Bi Gan or Portugal’s Miguel Gomes are in these ranks can be a helpful reminder that “Oscar bait” means something far different than it did 20 years ago.
I’m personally thrilled to see Danielle Deadwyler invited on the strength of her performances in films like The Piano Lesson and Till, even though Oscar nominations have remained frustratingly elusive. I remember talking to both Inside Out 2 director Kelsey Mann and Conclave producer Michael Jackman during awards season and marveling that they were not yet Academy members; it is a relief to see the Academy has changed that.
And in proof that last season’s awards gossip is not truly dead, it is noteworthy that while Emilia Pérez actress Adriana Paz was invited to join the Academy, Karla Sofía Gascón — the film’s title star, a historic best actress nominee and, perhaps you’ll recall, a fairly infamous internet user — was not. And though Selena Gomez was not a nominee for Emilia Pérez, she would have been a reasonable new invitee as well (but isn’t). New Academy members must be sponsored by two existing members to be considered, so this process can’t be called a “snub” the way you might for an actual nomination. But among others who had a strong presence over the last awards season, I noticed the omission of Anora’s Mark Eydelshteyn as well as Wicked’s Jonathan Bailey, who even scored a supporting actor nomination at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. For Bailey, at least, with Wicked: For Good on the horizon, a second chance at scoring a membership may be coming very soon.
For much more on that and everything else, catch up on my and Chris’s Substack Live chat above.
Festival Season
As for the TIFF lineup, this is just a tiny portion of the titles that will largely be announced starting on July 21; it’s long been the festival’s tradition to announce a slew of titles while I’m at the beach with my family, so I will look forward to scrolling through these lineups from a lounge chair. Many films that we have good reason to expect as TIFF premieres, like the new Knives Out film, Wake Up, Dead Man, and the Colin Farrell-Margot Robbie-starring A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, will hopefully be confirmed then.
From this list, I’m obviously excited about a new film from Steven Soderbergh, who’s working at a remarkable pace even by his own standards (Soderbergh is so prolific, he was a double best director nominee in 2001 for Traffic and Erin Brockovich, winning for the former). Now, the Oscar winner is premiering his third film of the year, after the spring’s fantastic one-two punch of Presence and Black Bag. This new film, The Christophers, involves art forgery and has a cast that includes Oscar nominee Ian McKellen and Emmy winners Michaela Coel and Jessica Gunning — enough said (although I’ll whisper that the fourth notable name is James Corden).
The other significant title in this initial lineup is Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, an update of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler that DaCosta somehow had time to make between The Marvels and the 28 Years Later follow-up scheduled for early next year. Hedda stars Tessa Thompson in the title role — again, enough said.
There’s not as much out there about the Spanish historical drama The Captive or the South Korean film Good News. Still, I’ll also keep an eye on the homegrown Canadian film Mile End Kicks with former Euphoria star Barbie Ferreira and Canadian acting royalty Jay Baruchel. The film’s director, Chandler Levack, earned some cinephile attention with her appropriately titled previous effort, I Like Movies, which premiered at TIFF in 2022.
As you might have heard, The Bear is back! Because I was not one of the few people allowed screeners, which mostly went to critics if at all, I am catching up just like the rest of you, and will hopefully have more to report next week on how the fourth season has landed. After making it through four episodes, I was delighted to see a brief cameo from an iconic actor-director (but not the same one who played himself on The Studio) and then a longer appearance from one of those new Academy members mentioned above. Given that this is a show where FX didn’t even reveal the episode titles until this morning, I’m guessing I should say no more.
As you also may have heard, Denis Villeneuve has been announced as the director of the next James Bond film, news that came both surprisingly quickly and took forever to confirm after Amazon MGM assumed complete creative control over the franchise in February. With Villeneuve already committed to making a third and final Dune film this summer, it will be quite a while before his Bond gets off the ground. All told, he will probably have spent more than a decade making big-budget franchise films — maybe not what you would expect for the director who broke out with the intimate family drama Incendies and the inventive sci-fi saga Arrival. Some Villeneuve fans I know see the Bond assignment as a waste of the blank check he’s earned from the Dune films. Personally, knowing the austere vision he’s been able to bring to one franchise, I’m intrigued to see how he can translate that to Bond — and maybe even more interested in that than whoever they finally, finally recruit to play 007.
Congratulations to the enormous team at the New York Times, who harnessed the kind of data analysis and graphics packages that usually explain serious topics like election results and dove into a topic much closer to my heart: the 100 best films of the 21st century so far. Late June is list season, it seems — Indiewire took stock of the best films of the 2020s so far last week, and the film newsletter The Reveal is doing its own 21st century countdown. This year, the timing felt especially perfect. It’s too hot outside and the news is too scary inside, so why not put on a movie instead?
I couldn’t resist taking the bait and building my own list (above), but I added a twist — movies that were in the Oscar race, and may have earned multiple nominations, but didn’t win anything. Retrospective lists like this offer a great opportunity to look back at how reputations change over time, and how the regard for a best picture winner like Gladiator — No. 92 on the list — can fade in favor of Oscar underdogs like Carol (No. 72). It’s a helpful reminder as we prepare for another awards season, in which some great movies will presumably be celebrated. Others will presumably, infuriatingly, be left behind. History will, eventually, sort things out the way they should be.
For more on the best films of the 21st century, and some inevitable kvetching about what I’ve left off my list, join me and Richard Rushfield live on Substack tomorrow at 10 a.m. PT.