How Will New Oscar Voters Change This Year’s Outcome?

Will this be the Oscars that Jennifer Lopez decided?

Last summer, a record 276 Hollywood players, including Lopez, Chris Tucker, "Machete" star Danny Trejo and "The Hangover" director Todd Phillips, were offered membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Subsequently, the number of eligible Oscar voters pushed past 6,000, another new high mark.

How will this numbers game affect the outcome of the races, including Best Picture where "12 Years a Slave" and "Gravity" appear locked in duel?
Maybe it won't.

"If anything, increasing the size only further guarantees the more obvious winner is likely to take the prize," Brad Brevet, creator of the film site RopeofSilicon.com, said in an email.

Brevet said he didn't consider Oscars' swelled ranks when he made his picks (his site gives the Best Picture edge to "12 Years a Slave," as do the oddsmakers and most experts on the awards panel Gold Derby) — and it's easy to see why.

The ranks, as it were, haven't swelled all that much. They haven't changed all that much, either.

[Related: 2014 Oscar Predictions: 'Gravity' Will Win the Most Oscars (But Not Best Picture)]

In 2012, the Los Angeles Times dug up data on the Academy's closely guarded membership list. The newspaper found Oscar voters were about as uniform as a group as could be: 94 percent white and 77 percent male.

In the two years since, the Times reported in December, the Academy has moved the diversity needle ever-so slightly. It's now 93 percent white and 76 percent male.

The biggest apparent push for new voices came last June when Lopez, et. al, were offered admission. The 276 invites were up nearly 100 from the year before.

But invites aren't always accepted, and turnover in a membership-for-life organization is slow. The overall number of new Academy members for the year ending in December amounted to 172, The Wrap reported. The acting branch, the industry-news Website said, saw its number of members fall from 2013 to 2012.

[Related: Oscars Anonymous: True-Life Confessions of an Academy Insider]

So, if history is going to be made at the Oscars on March 2 — and it might be, and in a couple of categories — it'll probably be made as much (or more) by veteran voters as new voters.

"We've never had a science-fiction film ['Gravity,' although its sci-fi-ness is a point of debate] or a film about the black struggle ['12 Years'] be this close to winning Best Picture," Clayton Davis, editor-in-chief of the Website, The Awards Circuit, said via email. "This shows an evolving and changing Academy."