LOS ANGELES — Vishal Bhardwaj built a filmography by transplanting Shakespeare into India: Macbeth into a Bombay crime family, Othello onto a cricket pitch in Uttar Pradesh, Hamlet into the militarized fog of Kashmir. The trilogy, completed in 2014 with Haider, earned him India’s National Film Awards and established him as the subcontinent’s most formally ambitious director working inside the commercial mainstream. On Wednesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited him to become an Oscar voter. If he accepts, he will join an institution that, after a decade of structural reform, has produced a voting class where more than half the new members come from outside the United States for the first time.
The Academy announced its 2026 membership class on Wednesday, extending invitations to 529 film professionals across all branches. The numbers have become the most legible evidence of how thoroughly the institution has remade its geography since the #OscarsSoWhite crisis of January 2016: this year’s class is 42 percent women, 56 percent from underrepresented communities, and 53 percent drawn from 60 countries and territories outside the United States. If all 529 accept, total Academy membership will reach 11,319, with 10,338 eligible to vote.
The arithmetic matters, but only to a point. The more consequential question, one the Academy has not yet demonstrated it can answer, is whether a more globally composed voter body translates into a more globally oriented nominations slate. According to Variety, the 2026 invitees include 95 Oscar nominees, among them 21 winners, lending the class an authority the institution has historically used to measure its own credibility. What has shifted since 2016 is not the question but the scale of the experiment. The answer will not be visible until the 99th Academy Awards nominations are announced next year.
Bhardwaj is among four Indian film professionals invited this cycle. Eka Lakhani, whose costume work on the Ponniyin Selvan series and Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani established her as one of contemporary Indian cinema’s foremost visual stylists, joins the Costume Designers branch. Film editors Deepa Bhatia, whose credits include Taare Zameen Par and My Name Is Khan, and A. Sreekar Prasad, one of the most prolific editors in Telugu and Tamil cinema, were both extended invitations to the Film Editors branch. The Indian representation in this cycle reflects both the industry’s global footprint and the Academy’s particular recognition of craft-level contributions from outside English-language filmmaking traditions.
The actors branch received the largest share of public attention. Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, co-leads in the forthcoming Frankenstein adaptation, were invited alongside Josh O’Connor, who delivered one of the year’s earlier industry moments in Spielberg’s Disclosure Day before its $44 million domestic opening and who now stars in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Jenna Ortega, whose industry standing after Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the continued streaming dominance of Wednesday has made her one of the more bankable names of her generation, joins the branch alongside Julia Garner.
Jon Bernthal, David Dastmalchian, Bill Skarsgård, Paddy Considine, Tig Notaro, Scoot McNairy, and Jemaine Clement join the actors branch, a group whose collective credits span some of the past decade’s most textured supporting performances. In the directors branch, IndieWire reported that Benny Safdie was invited, giving the Safdie brothers a shared formal stake in an institution they have long influenced from outside its structures. Zach Cregger, the Weapons director who has established himself as one of the more formally inventive genre filmmakers working in American cinema, and Oliver Laxe, whose Sirât competed at Cannes this year, were also included.
The class includes an unusual addition outside the creative branches. Josh D’Amaro, who was named chief executive of The Walt Disney Company this spring, was invited to join the Academy. The inclusion of a studio executive at Disney’s level raises a structural question the Academy’s bylaws address but seldom need to answer in public: whether industry infrastructure and creative judgment belong in the same ballot. D’Amaro’s invitation follows a general pattern of the Academy broadening its tent while maintaining that the separation between business decisions and creative evaluation is a structural given.
The timing of the 2026 invitation class places these new voters in an Oscar season already beginning to take shape. Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this May, enters the awards race with the kind of international critical standing that the Academy’s expanded membership has, in recent cycles, proven increasingly willing to reward. Whether the new voters, many of them international filmmakers and craftspeople, will accelerate that trend or whether the nominations ultimately reflect the familiar centers of gravity is the experiment the class of 2026 represents. The 99th Academy Awards are scheduled for spring 2027. The offers expire. The ballots follow.
