Venice 2021: The Jury

by Nathaniel R

With Cannes wrapped we move on to the fall festival buzz. Next up is Venice (September 1st-11th) and we are thrilled to report that Elisa Giudici, our Italian correspondent who did such a fine job covering Cannes, will repeat that trick for Venice. The 78th Venice festival has just announced the complete jury for its competition films. Like Cannes, they've chosen a majority female jury this time around. Unlike Cannes they went big on very recent Oscar nominees and winners...

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The Academy Welcomes 395 New Members

by Nathaniel R

Harry Yoon (Editor), Lee Isaac Chung (Writer/Director) and Christian Oh (Producer) were all invited to the Academy post MINARI

Each year the Academy releases the names of their potential new members. Reports range a bit at how many voting members the Academy actually has. Deadline suggests that if all 395 of the new invitees accept membership, AMPAS will be around 9,750ish members while the LA Times places the number around 10,700. We're not sure where that discrepancy of nearly a 1000 voters comes from but let's just say it's hard to track. We rarely learn who declined membership, for example, and of course people die from year to year since many longtime members are elderly. 

As per usual, even before the Academy's largely successfully diversification and gender parity drive, a good portion of the invitees go out to fresh winners and nominees from the previous season. If they accept Youn Yuh-jung, Maria Bakalova, Steven Yeun, Paul Raci, and H.E.R. (to name a handful of examples) will now be Oscar voters. 46% of the new invitees are women and 39% are from underrepresented groups. One really interesting number is that over half of the new invitees, 53% to be exact, are international invites. Whether that translates to more international titles winning Oscar favor, who knows...

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