Welcome to The Academy

This is an excerpt from the weekly entertainment industry newsletter The 11th Hour Dispatch. Subscribe to get analysis like this, live and in color in your inbox every Friday night.

They did it you guys! They proved women CAN make movies! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited 842 new members this week, and half of them are women. In fact, ten of the 17 arms of The Academy invited more women than men. Most notably in directing, which is important, as Hollywood has a track record of struggling to get women in the director’s chair. I blame their high heels. Also! 29% of the new invitees are people of color. If they all accept their invitations, the number of PoC in The Academy would double. That’s nuts. And while it’s undeniably late to the game, these are still important steps forward. The Academy has historically struggled with diversity, as was evident with the #OscarsSoWhite campaign of 2016, and it’s showing that it’s listening the outrage, both with this year’s class of invitees and its noticeably diverse array of people that took home Oscars last year.