I can’t remember a time when the Academy announced as many major developments as it has over the past year. Last summer, the storied 10,000-plus-member group behind the Oscars announced a new theatrical requirement for all best-picture nominees, beginning in 2025, to run in at least 10 of 50 major US markets—a dramatic increase from current rules, and a clear statement in the streaming era. This month alone, the Academy’s Board of Governors announced both the addition of a new casting award to be implemented in 2026—the first new competitive Oscar in more than two decades—and the formation of separate branches for animated features and short films, following years in which the two formats were controversially combined.
If some of these changes seem in the weeds, they’re reflective of a broader reality that anyone who loves movies (and of course, awards season) should know: The Oscars are changing—faster than ever.
This is a fact reflected in this year’s thrilling, sometimes divisive nominations. Non-English-language films are more prominent than ever, from Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest competing for best picture and more to Japanese titles The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One finding love in the animation and visual-effects categories, respectively. You could say the Parasite phenomenon from 2020 set a new kind of template. As I discuss on this week’s Little Gold Men with Academy president Janet Yang (who oversees the Board of Governors to set strategy) and CEO Bill Kramer (who oversees the Academy’s employees and business), these are direct results of a concerted push to make the Academy more global. Around a quarter of members are now non-American, and ballots are being cast from a record number of countries.
It’s a lot to get into. You won’t meet two people who think more about the Oscars, and their future, year-round.
Vanity Fair: How do you define the project of the Oscars—this tradition that evolves and changes as this medium changes—these days?
Janet Yang: When it comes to the Oscars, it is a fascinating project. I like the way you put that, because it is traditional, it’s been around for a long time, so much of the industry revolves around it, and it becomes the focus of a lot of other industry activities—but at the same time, the industry is also changing and audiences are changing and the way audiences watch things are changing. So we like to think we’re being innovative and entrepreneurial while still preserving the legacy and the traditions that people love and expect from the Oscars.
Bill Kramer: Obviously, people know us for the Oscars. It is the biggest award show in cinema in the world. Definitely defines our brand, continues to. It’s one of the many ways we recognize and celebrate cinema. We also have our Governors Awards, our SciTech Awards, our Student Academy Awards—but we also have the world’s largest film museum. We’re a preserver and a curator and a programmer of film history. We have the largest film-related collection in the world, over 23 million items across disciplines, props, costumes, scripts, photographs. We’ve been collecting since the 1920s. No one has a collection of this scale. We’re also a membership organization: We have 11,000 global members. These are film artists and professionals of the highest caliber across disciplines. All of this is to say, when I think about our future, obviously the Oscars are a huge part of it, but we’re really planning for our next 100 years and thinking about a much more holistic way of thinking about the Academy. We sit in a space that is really about centering the work of the global film community across disciplines, genres, eras, areas. The Oscars will always be a huge part of the work that we do, but we’re so much more than that.
This global film community you’re focusing on is very reflected in this year’s nominations. What about bringing in more international members and expanding the reach of the Oscars reflects this effort that both of you were talking about, to look toward the future and to plan for these next 100 years?
Yang: The world is definitely getting smaller. Communication across national boundaries is now the norm. In the recent years that we’ve seen this change of more international presence in our nominations, that I think will become more the norm as well. That reflects the internationalization of our membership. It is interesting how quickly the evidence of the change of membership is reflected in the nominations. There’s so much talent around the world. It creates a much more robust and interesting Academy to recognize that.
Kramer: One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that people were engaging with movies in a way that we had not seen before. The lines between international, classic, cinema, documentaries, and animation blurred a bit. People were at home watching films, and I think the approach to engaging with cinema has become much more global. The Academy sits at the center of that. So as Janet said, we’re much more global as a membership than we used to be. 25% of our members are non-U.S. You’re seeing this reflected in our nominations, international cinema beyond the international feature film category. For the Academy to evolve with the way film lovers, the film industry, and filmmakers are engaging with cinema, we need to become more global and we’re doing it.
Yang: It’s interesting that it was just three years ago where director Bong Joon-ho talked about subtitles being an obstacle, and now that obstacle has seemed to dissolve overnight. That was in large part because of the pandemic and because people are just used to it. I know younger generations like looking at subtitles even when it’s in their native language because they feel like, that way, they won’t miss any of the dialogue. Habits are changing.