The List of the 819 New Academy Members Is Here!

LaKeith Stanfield

It's that time again. Every year The Academy puts in an effort to expand their voting base to include a lot of the best and brightest in the entertainment industry. This includes a goal of expanding diversity to include talents globally. With 819 new members, the list features an exciting new group that will help determine what next year's ceremony will look like. Along with the first time choice to let agents vote, check out the list of new faces, which continues to show how many interesting voices are out there, ready to make a difference. Who are some of your favorites? Feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Best Song: "(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again" (2019)

Scene from Rocketman

Welcome to Best Song, a new weekly column released on Sunday dedicated to chronicling the Best Original Song category over the course of its many decades. The goal is to listen to and critique every song that has ever been nominated in the category as well as find the Best Best Song and the Best Loser. By the end, we'll have a comprehensive list of this music category and will hopefully have a better understanding not only of the evolution but what it takes to receive a nomination here. It may seem easy now but wait until the bad years.

Review: "Harriet" Only Gets So Far With Conventional Story

Scene from Harriet (2019)

There's no biopic that has as much pressure to live up to as director Kasi Lemmons' Harriet. It's likely that those who have been in a history class anytime over the past 100 years will know the achievements of Harriet Tubman, even vaguely. She is a prime figure in the success of The Underground Railroad, and that's just the start to something more exciting and empowering about her story. There's so much ground to cover to the point that it's impossible to fathom why it took until 2019 for Tubman to receive the biopic treatment. Harriet is a film that has to be something for everybody as a result, being neither too salacious for those discovering her story nor too sentimental and false. Where does one possibly go with this material for a first outing? The answer is somewhere safe in the middle, producing a film that is satisfying but lacks any urgency that will revive Tubman's legacy to a new generation.