International
Hawk Koch is president of the Academy
MUMBAI: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ board of governors have elected film producer Hawk Koch as its new president yesterday. He succeeds Tom Sherak, who has held the honorary position since 2009.
After assuming the Academy post, Koch follows in the footsteps of his father, the late producer Howard W. Koch, who served as Academy president from 1977 to 1979.
Koch has been a member of the Academy‘s producer‘s branch since 2004. He has served a three-year term as treasurer, served another one-year term as vice president, and was first vice president of the Academy during the past year.
The veteran film producer‘s credits range from 1978‘s Heaven Can Wait to 1992‘s Wayne‘s World and its 1993 sequel to 2002‘s Collateral Damage. He recently served as executive producer of Source Code and is exec producer on the upcoming Very Good Girls. Hawk also currently serves, along with Mark Gordon, as one of the two presidents of the Producers Guild of America.
The board also elected public relations branch governor Cheryl Boone Isaacs as the board‘s first vice president. While producer Kathleen Kennedy was elected as one vp post, writers branch governor Phil Robinson was elected as the second. Public relations branch governer Rob Friedman, co-chairman and CEO of Summit Entertainment, was elected treasurer. Finally, executives branch governor Robert Rehme, who was a past Academy president, was elected secretary.
The Academy president is elected from among the board of governors. While the Academy president can serve as many as four consecutive one-year terms, Koch‘s tenure will be limited to one year, since members of the board of governors may serve a maximum of three consecutive three-year terms, and he is currently beginning his last year as a member of the board.
The board also elected public relations branch governor Cheryl Boone Isaacs as the board‘s first vice president. While producer Kathleen Kennedy was elected as one vp post, writers branch governor Phil Robinson was elected as the second. Public relations branch governer Rob Friedman, co-chairman and CEO of Summit Entertainment, was elected treasurer. Finally, executives branch governor Robert Rehme, who was a past Academy president, was elected secretary.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and Sofía Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. Sofía Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
