Welcome to the Academy!

In the now annual tradition the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released the names of the filmmakers, actors, artisans, executives, and more that they've invited to join the Academy. These 397 new members (should they accept the invites) will be able to vote on the Oscar nominations for their branch as well as Best Picture. To determine the winners later on each season, all members vote on everything (except some cases with specialty categories where the rules have been known to change from year to year)

In keeping with their drive for diversification they've released the following stats:

The 2022 class is 44% women, 37% belong to underrepresented ethnic/racial communities, and 50% are from 53 countries and territories outside the United States.  

We've included the full list of invitees after the jump with a few comments...

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Ranking the International Feature Film Winners

by Juan Carlos Ojano

From De Sica to Hamaguchi, the past two years of hosting the podcast The One-Inch Barrier has allowed me to watch all that films that were selected by the Academy for its International Feature Film category - 74 winners and 337 nominees (all but one title). While this category has had its issues over the years, it has also put an international spotlight on non-English language cinema on Hollywood’s biggest night. While the category has  always been far from a perfect encapsulation of world cinema, it's a great jumping off point as noted in the series finale.  (Cláudio Alves did a beautiful summary of our discussion - video included!). 

Here is my personal not-that-definitive ranking of the winners of the category. Things are very fluid especially in the midsection... 

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Anthony Hopkins to play Sigmund Freud (and a little Oscar history)

by Nathaniel R

Hopkins image via The Guardian

Sir Anthony Hopkins, who is now 84, is in the middle of a late career golden period winning a much-deserved second Oscar for The Father and now getting mostly glowing reviews for a grandfather role in Armageddon Time.  He'll also appear in The Father 's thematic sequel The Son late this year, though this time he doesn't have the leading titular role. Yesterday we learned that Hopkins is set to play Sigmund Freud in a new film called Freud's Last Session. Announcements about famous actors doing biographical roles is not particularly noteworthy as it seems to happen about 24 times each year. But this news is amusing and interesting given Hopkins film history...

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The next Oscar Night will be March 12th, 2023

We finally have the dates for next Oscar season. Things aren't quite back to normal since we're still not back in early February (which the Academy had been working towards for years, finally getting there the year of Parasite) but at least it's a bit earlier than last season.

Governors Awards (Honorary Oscars) - Saturday, November 19th, 2022
Voting on Categories with Shortlists - December 12th through the 15th, 2022
Shortlists Announcements - Wednesday, December 21st, 2022
Nomination Voting - January 12th through the 17th, 2023
Nominations Announced - Tuesday January 24th, 2023
Nominee Luncheon - Monday, Febriuary 13th, 2023
Final Oscar Voting - March 2nd through the 7th, 2023
95th Annual Academy Awards - Sunday, March 12th, 2023

TRIVIA NOTE: This is the first time ever that Oscar night will be held on March 12th so those of you with March 12th birthdays finally have the ceremony on your birthday. (The dates when the most Oscars throughout history have been held is a tie between March 25th and March 29th each having had five ceremonies.)

We can finally set those countdown clocks. It's just 256 days until Nomination Morning and 303 days until Oscar night.

Academy bans Will Smith for 10 years

by Nathaniel R

Two weeks too late the Academy has essentially asked Will Smith to leave the building. The only appropriate time to do that would have been immediately post-slap, if you ask us. But after letting him stay and deliver a tearful speech in which he apologized as well as blamed the devil, and giving him a standing ovation, they don't really have much of a moral high ground to do so now. But they had to say something... 

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