Star Trek is known for recruiting the best actors and actresses possible. Starting from the original series in the 1960s, they landed William Shatner, a stage actor with a variable range. Later on with the Next Generation, they recruited and signed acclaimed theater actor Patrick Stewart to lead the way. Nearly every major name to join the shows as the lead has had a bevy of roles to their name, increasing the visual that the leading star in Star Trek was in fact the top of the class.
Awards or not.
Yet, for Holly Hunter, the newest star of a Star Trek series, she's going to do something that no one has ever done before, lead a Star Trek show while being an Academy Award winner. It's not easy to be nominated for the Academy Awards, aka the Oscars, let alone win one. So to have a star of her magnitude join the brand is huge, so huge that she joins a very exclusive club.
While Hunter will be the first lead of a Star Trek show to be an Oscar winner, she's not the first one to appear on Star Trek having won an Academy Award. Both Louise Fletcher (Kai Winn on Deep Space Nine) and F. Murray Abraham (Ahdar Ru'afo in Insurrection) won theirs before joining the show.
There is a fourth, but she won hers after appearing on The Next Generation and that is Whoopi Goldberg. She was nominated for her first in The Color Purple in 1986, the year prior to The Next Generation's premiere season and two years before she joined the cast. She would lose out to Geraldine Page.
She would later win her second nomination in 1990, for her work in Ghost.
So it's safe to say that Hunter's arrival with the franchise is a huge get for Star Trek With her prestige, acting skills, and the direction of the franchise focus more on the core qualities that Star Trek has embraced in the past, it's fair to say that the Academy show is setting itself up for success.
Though we'll have to wait and see what and who else is joining up.