Is The Academy Changing Hands?
The future of Hollywood in on full display. The 2026 Oscars didn't snub the old guard. They replaced them.
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Julia Roberts, Daniel Day-Lewis. Five of the most bankable names in Hollywood history all had big films in 2025 and all five missed acting nominations entirely.
The Academy handed nominations to Delroy Lindo, Jacob Elordi, Stellan Skarsgård, Rose Byrne, Wunmi Mosaku, and Renate Reinsve. These are names that most casual moviegoers can’t pick out of a lineup. Sinners broke the all-time nomination record with 16. While Ryan Coogler is no stranger to the Oscars, a vampire-blue film certainly is. And what about Wicked: For Good? It was the biggest franchise play of the year (and sequel to a film that earned 10 nominations and two Oscars just twelve months ago). It was shut out completely: zero nominations.
This wasn’t just a bad year for the old guard. This feels like someone is closing the door.
We got a usual and predicable reaction from the nominations. Some people were snubbed, then varying outrage ensues. Pundits entrenched in ‘Old Hollywood’ assume that the Academy made some sort of a mistake, that voters got it wrong, that something broke in the process. But nothing broke. The machine is working exactly as designed, it’s just being operated by different people now.
Generational turnover in institutions doesn’t happen gradually. It happens in bursts.
Here’s a fact nobody’s talking about: the Academy nearly doubled its membership in under a decade. In 2012, the organization had roughly 5,800 members who were 94% white, 77% male, with a median age of 62. After the #OscarsSoWhite reckonings of 2015 and 2016, the Academy launched an aggressive expansion with record-setting invitation classes year after year, pulling in younger filmmakers, more women, more international voices, more people of color. By 2025, membership exceeded 11,000 with dramatically different demographics (+10% women, and +24% non-white)
That’s not a minor tweak. That’s a recipe for a regime change.
New members vote differently than old ones. Not because they’re trying to make a statement, but because they have different points of view, different canons, different definitions of what extraordinary looks like. Nearly half the voting body joined in the last eight years. A Ryan Coogler vampire-blues film earning more nominations than any movie in Oscar history isn’t an aberration. It’s the new membership expressing its taste at scale for the first time.
Some of the sharpest evidence might be Hamnet. The film earned eight nominations for Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao, Best Actress for Jessie Buckley, and Best Adapted Screenplay among others. It succeeded by every measure the Academy uses. But it didn’t carry the old model of stardom. The film worked because it was good and it hit with audiences (much like Anora did last year); these films didn’t need a mega-name to guarantee their nomination. They were great stories, well written, with strong directing, and strength in acting.
Look at the supporting actor category.
Delroy Lindo at 73 years old, over 50 films deep, famously snubbed for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. He finally gets his first nomination.
Stellan Skarsgård at 74, more than 200 credits, the first supporting actor nominee ever from an international film and he gets his first nod too.
Wunmi Mosaku with her first Oscar nomination, for Sinners. Best known for her TV work in Loki and Lovecraft Country). In the old world of Hollywood, moving from TV to movie recognition can be a life long battle.
Jacob Elordi, who most people still associate with a Netflix teen franchise, earns his first nomination for playing the Creature in del Toro’s Frankenstein.
These aren’t sentimental picks. They’re a voting body with different eyes looking at the same industry and seeing different things.
That's what this Oscar class is really about. For decades, Hollywood's gatekeepers controlled the pipeline and decided what got made, who got seen, and which stories counted. The doors to the premium rooms were locked. We played along because the system felt like a relationship. You watched Clooney and Roberts enough times that they started to feel like people you knew. The star system wasn't just marketing. It was a substitution for connection; a curated, sanitized version of culture designed to land softly in suburban living rooms.
The pipeline is cracked now.
The same phone where you streamed Sinners can stream Sentimental Value (a Norwegian family drama most Americans never would have heard of ten years ago). The stories don't need permission from a room full of old white men to reach you anymore. When people get access to the full range of what film can be, not just what a handful of executives decided plays, Oscar nominee’s get pick differently. The Academy didn't break. It just started reflecting a world where culture isn't filtered through three cable channels and a multiplex.
That’s what this Oscar class is telling you. It’s a reminder that the world is changing and the lasting effects of the internet are only starting. The snub list isn’t a list of who got unlucky. It’s a roster of who hasn’t figured out that the club has new owners and the new owners aren’t interested in legacy pricing.