Actor Vidya Balan and producers Ekta Kapoor and Shobha Kapoor will join the new batch of executive members in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the governing body of the Oscars.
On its website, the Academy shared its Class of 2021 comprising 395 new members from 50 countries.
Other celebrities in the new batch include actors Robert Pattinson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Steven Yeun, Yuh-Jung Youn, Andra Day and Maria Bakalova, directors Emerald Fennell, Florian Zeller and Lee Isaac Chung, cinematographers Erik Messerschmidt and Manuel Alberto Claro, and many others.
53% of the new members are from the international community, 46% are women and 39% are from underrepresented ethnic or racial communities.
Vidya Balan has appeared in critically-acclaimed films like Kahaani, The Dirty Picture and the recent Sherni. Ekta Kapoor and Shobha Kapoor head Balaji Telefilms and its subsidiaries. The company’s last feature production was Pagglait (on Netflix).