Academy CEO Bill Kramer on the Organization’s Global Ambitions: ‘We’re Not the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’

AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer is sending an unmistakable message about the Academy’s ambitions.

“The Academy is a global organization,” Kramer said at Marrakech Film Festival on Tuesday. “We’re not the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.”

Underscoring that mission, Kramer has been a prominent presence at this year’s edition of the Moroccan fest, walking the red carpet, meeting delegates and emerging filmmakers through the Atlas Workshops industry program, and joining festival executive VP Faïçal Laraïchi for a conversation that never veered off-message.

“We live in a global society,” Kramer said. “We care that movies are made and seen around the world. That’s important to us and to the evolution of the industry.” He later added, “A nonprofit organization has to think about a sustainable future. This work is helping the Academy build that future.”

With nearly 25% of the Academy’s 11,000 members now based abroad, and with another 150–200 new international members welcomed each year since Kramer took over, AMPAS’ global expansion is part of a broader strategy to build a durable foundation as the traditional studio system continues to shift. Kramer acknowledged as much, offering a rare glimpse into closed-door conversations when asked about a potential Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

“There may be some contraction with traditional Hollywood studios,” said Kramer, who began his career at an arts fundraiser and still views his work through that lens. “So if there is a contraction of the studios, financially, we’re ensuring that the Academy can continue to thrive and survive. We’re in the middle of a $500 million fundraising campaign — we’ve raised almost $250 million so far — which runs through the end of 2028. This is to beef up our endowment as an insurance policy. One of the things the pandemic taught anyone running an arts organization or nonprofit is that your earned income, your ticket sales, can go away instantly if something happens. You need other sources of funding.”

“So we’re tracking what’s happening with the studios — I mean, these are our members! — and there are a lot of new studios forming that aren’t of the traditional Hollywood mold,” he continued. “I don’t think this contraction will hurt our financial situation.”

Kramer also shed light on the internal campaign to create a new award for stunt design — revealing that reigning best picture champion “Anora” played a key role in securing the prize.

“The fight scene in ‘Anora,’ in the house where they were trying to kidnap the protagonist, was a heavily choreographed stunt sequence,” Kramer says. “Though when you think of stunts, you don’t typically picture a scene like that.”

To help define and demystify the new award — and the technical craft it recognizes — Kramer held a showcase for the Academy’s board, spotlighting and deconstructing high-level stunt work in some unexpected places.

“Almost every film has stunts of some kind,” Kramer explains. “And I’m not just talking about action films. When we pitched this prize to our board of governors — saying, ‘We would like to do this. Please vote on this’ — we actually used clips from smaller independent films where you wouldn’t immediately think stunts were involved, just to show how deeply embedded these disciplines are in all areas of moviemaking.”