Oscar Academy invites 20 Bollywood stars including Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited 928 new members this year, and 20 people on the list are from Bollywood. 

Last year, Aamir Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Irrfan Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Aishwarya Rai, Mrinal Sen, Gautam Ghose and Sooni Taraporevala were invited by the Academy from India, Scroll reports. 

The 20 Bollywood actors that are invited are; Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit Nene, Madhabi Mukherjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Naseeruddin Shah, Ali Fazal, Anil Kapoor and Tabu are the Indian actors on the list, while Aditya Chopra and Guneet Monga are the Indian producers invited to the honorary body. Cinematographer Anil Mehta, costume designers Dolly Ahluwalia and Manish Malhotra, sound designers Debajit Changmai and Biswadeep Chatterjee, production designers Subrata Chakraborty and Amit Ray, music composers Usha Khanna and Sneha Khanwalkar and film editor Ballu Saluja are also in the list.

The expansion of the Academy comes after the anti-diversity backlash faced by the Oscars in 2015 and 2016. If all the members accept the invitation, the total strength of the Academy will increase to 9,226.

Talking about the progress of Indian cinema to be recognized in a global platform, actress Priyanka Chopra was quoted by TheQuint saying, "It's interesting that though (past Indian) winners were Indian, it was for their work in international films — largely about India, but not made by India. For a global community like India to be represented on a larger scale, I think it will have to move beyond a single award for all foreign language films. It is very rare to see foreign language films represented in the other categories,"

The Academy has taken a different step this year by inviting personalities from 59 different nationalities.