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Damn, the Academy Asked Out Steven Yeun and Robert Pattinson Before You Got a Chance

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Getty Images

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is keeping things a little more exclusive than before. While previous years have seen the Academy invite around 800 new members a year — the better to help the group achieve its post-#OscarsSoWhite diversity benchmarks — the 2021 crop of invitees is a comparatively slim 395 names. (Not everyone who’s invited joins, but the Academy says almost all of them do.) Among them: 2020 Oscar-season standouts like Maria Bakalova, Paul Raci, Leslie Odom, Jr., Steven Yeun, and Youn Yuh-jung; character actors Stephen Root and Isiah Whitlock, Jr; buzzy newcomers like Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Janicza Bravo; and people you might have thought already were members, like Nathan Lane, Robert Pattinson, and Janet Jackson. (Talk about poetic justice.) To see the full list of new invitees, click here.

Damn, the Academy Asked Out Steven Yeun and Robert Pattinson