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This year’s Oscars were a tipping point, it felt like. They were also incredibly boring and incredibly white. As soon as the 2015 Oscar nominations came out, #OscarsSoWhite began trending, mostly because there were notably snubs for Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo. For a month, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs (an African-American woman) had to defend the mostly white, mostly old, mostly male Academy members’ conservative tastes, to little avail.

Well, now Isaacs has released the list of new Academy members, and she seems to be trying to bring in some new demographics. Inch by inch, Ms. Isaacs. This year’s Academy invitees (as in, they are invited to join the Academy voter rolls) include a historic 322 new names. They’ve never invited so many new people all at once! And there are more people of color, more younger people and more women. Some highlighted names:

Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Kevin Hart, David Oyelowo, Common, Morten Tyldum, Emma Stone, Sergio Mendes, Elizabeth Banks, John Legend, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Rick Famuyiwa, Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike, Eddie Redmayne, J.K. Simmons, Martin Freeman, Heather Graham, Trent Reznor, Dev Patel, Chris Pine, Damien Chazelle, Daniel Radcliffe and Jason Segel.

The Wrap says that the Academy used to try to keep their membership around 6,000, but in 2013 they changed the rules to bring in some new blood and ever since, the Academy has been adding more and more people and now the membership is around 7,000. The percentage of women in the Academy hovers around 25-30%, with last year’s membership being on the low end (25%).

Also… TOM HARDY. God, I need him to become a member of the Academy of My Pants. I also love that the Academy invited Martin Freeman and Benedict at the same time. The Academy is all, “Alan Turing what? You’ll always be Holmes & Watson to us.”

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Photos courtesy of WENN.
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