Cannes is the birthplace for any number of future Best International Feature Film Oscar nominees, like last year’s Grand Prize winner “Close,” or winners like 2021 Competition entry “Drive My Car.” This year’s possibilities include the UK’s rapturously received German-language from UK filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, “The Zone of Interest;” Argentina’s Un Certain Regard entry “The Delinquents,” a three-hour existential heist movie picked up by Mubi; or Japan’s “Monster,” the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose “Shoplifters” scored both the Palme d’Or and an Oscar nomination. However, before they can be nominated they must be submitted — and that, as Academy members well know, is the rub.

The demand for reform boils down to this: Too often the decision of Oscar submissions belongs to decision-makers instead of filmmakers, and that can lead to some… frustrating choices. Last year India did not submit “RRR” and Italy declined to select well-reviewed Cannes entry “The Eight Mountains,” which was directed on location in Italy by the Belgian team of Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. “If I could change [the Oscars], it’d be this idea to have the category be more open, so any movie could apply for it,” van Groeningen told IndieWire. “Then it would be a process of natural selection.”

Countries choose their Oscar picks in different ways. Some appoint small committees; some have a national Academy. In Brazil, Iran, and Russia, the committee are dominated by their governments; even in a democratic country like France, the selection process is dominated by industry powermongers. Cannes director Thierry Fremaux was on the committee for years and was often accused of favoring Cannes titles.

This year, among the myriad Academy rule changes was a new rule for Best International Feature Film that requires each country’s Oscar submission selection committee be comprised of 50 percent “artists and or craftspeople from the field of motion pictures.” This doesn’t exactly qualify as radical reform: Prior to its codification as a rule, a 50 percent “guideline” (one that was unavailable to public view) was in place for years. Still, to the extent that countries around the world care about the Oscars, most are likely to comply.

Even so, the new rule does little to address how AMPAS should deal with exiled and banned filmmakers, or with otherwise orphaned films that have no home. International Feature Film executive committee co-chairs Danish Oscar-winner Susanne Bier (“In a Better World”) and MoMa’s chief curator of film, Rajendra Roy, who have been deeply researching the processes behind making international Oscar selections, have yet to figure out a solution to these issues. So they started with a smaller step.

“The thing that was clear to both of us was that there was a real need for more transparency for submitting countries,” said Roy on the phone. “There’s obviously a need for transparency… there still seemed to be confusion amongst the countries about how to submit. There just wasn’t a lot of consistency, but the thing we needed to be true was that people who make movies, and all those in whatever form that takes, are part of at least 50 percent of that process.”

Every year, questions to the Academy abound from selection committees about International Feature Film category awards rules, committee guidelines and criteria, and the submission process. When Bhutan tried to submit for the first time, they had no approved official selection committee. The country needed help from the Academy to establish a selection committee and submit a film. Ultimately, Bhutan earned a surprise nomination for Pawo Choyning Dorji’s “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom.”

Attempts to reform the Academy’s foreign-language selection process have included the 2006 change in which a submitted film no longer had to be in the language of its own home country. That allowed Denmark, for example, to submit the country’s Profile Pictures production “Holy Spider” last year; the film was shot in Persian in Jordan. After Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” was passed over for a 2008 nomination, the Academy formed a foreign committee that weighs in on the final selection. That committee was abandoned in 2021, but the Academy expanded the shortlist to 15 and added online viewing to a wider slice of global voters.

To manage international submissions, in April 2022 the Academy hired former Sundance programmer Dilcia Barrera as the Academy’s new senior VP of member relations, global outreach, and administration. She works closely with Meredith Shea, a former AMPAS membership and awards exec who returned to the Academy fold this April as chief membership, impact, and industry officer. “It was an important step for the Academy to find the right staff person to step into the role, someone to focus on international,” said Roy.

While the Academy has long asked countries to submit selection committee memberships to scrutiny, the official rule plus an identifiable enforcer provides more heft.

If Roy has his druthers, the next guideline-that-could-become-a-rule will ask the countries to impose term limits on their selection committees, much like the AMPAS board of governors’ three years. (The Academy suggests six-year cycles separated by two-year hiatuses.) Filmmakers have expressed frustration, Roy said, that there’s often no room for their inclusion.

One step at a time. Clearly, the Academy has no plans to throw out the entry model of one film per country anytime soon. For now, Roy said, it’s a matter of finding “ways of making it work better.”

It has been more than a decade since John Cena and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson faced off in a pair of WrestleMania matches influenced by Cena’s frustrations with Johnson leaving WWE behind for Hollywood. Now, with Cena taking the same path, he says he was a “hypocrite.”

“I got selfish, and me living WWE at the point and not having any concept of growth or someone else’s perspective, I took Dwayne’s comments as not genuine,” the 15-time WWE champion said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “My view was, if you love something, be there everyday. What a hypocrite I am, because I still love WWE and I can’t go all the time. And I just didn’t see that, I was so selfish.”

Back in 2008, during the height of Cena’s run as a perennial WWE Championship contender, he said in an interview with British tabloid The Sun that while he believed Johnson was a “fantastic human being,” he didn’t understand how the “Scorpion King” star could say he was still passionate about wrestling when he hadn’t appeared in a WWE ring for years.

“He, at one point, loved wrestling and wanted to do this all of his life,” Cena said. “Explain to me why he can’t come back for a 15th Anniversary show or why he can’t make an appearance at Wrestlemania. Simply put it’s because he wants to be an actor. There’s nothing wrong with that…Just don’t f–k me around and tell me that you love this when you are just doing this to do something else. That’s the only thing that gets me really pissed off.”

In 2011, Johnson made his long-awaited return to WWE as The Rock and entered a feud with Cena that saw him defeat Cena at WrestleMania in 2012 and win the WWE Championship in 2013 before losing it to Cena in a Mania rematch. During that feud, Cena cut promos in the ring influenced by his real-life comments questioning The Rock’s commitment to wrestling, even calling out people like Johnson’s producing partner and manager Hiram Garcia, whom he called “the guy I have to talk to to talk to the other guy to get even close to Dwayne.”

The promos were a hit with fans, but created backstage animosity between the two men.

“I wanted a main event marquee match because it would better what I thought was the business. And that’s so short-sighted and selfish,” Cena said on Happy Sad Confused. “It worked, but it worked at the cost of two people who communicated and almost put it in jeopardy. And there was a moment where there was a lot of bad vibes between us, and rightfully so.”

Today, Cena is 46 years old, five years older than Johnson was when he returned to WWE. Since 2019, Cena’s appearances in WWE have become sporadic as he has transitioned to a film career in which he’s landed roles in HBO Max’s “Peacemaker” and in the new film “Fast X.”

Cena did have a match at this year’s WrestleMania with up-and-coming wrestler Austin Theory, but the match was a show opener that lasted just over 11 minutes, less than half the time the 23-minute main event matches he put on with The Rock in 2013 and with current WWE Champion Roman Reigns in 2021.

In an interview with Busted Open Radio earlier this week, Cena admitted that his time in the ring may be at an end, despite his desire to keep performing in WWE.

“I wish I was still there every day. My body can’t do it anymore, and I don’t want to give the consumer a bad product,” he said.

But now, there is a possibility that Cena and Johnson may share the screen for the first time, as a post-credits scene in “Fast X” showed Johnson’s return as Luke Hobbs. With both men now part of the “Fast & Furious” series, they may end up racing muscle cars together as the franchise prepares to release its final installments in the coming years…though anyone who has seen “Fast X” knows that the series might have to do some of its signature narrative swerves to make that happen.

You can watch the entire interview with Cena by clicking here. The conversation switches to his relationship with Johnson around the 18:29 mark.

The Writers Guild of America will not picket the 2023 Tony Awards, the union announced Monday.

In a statement, the union said that it will not negotiate an interim agreement or a waiver for the Tony Awards, as previously reported, but that it will not picket this year’s show in whatever form it does move forward.

“Tony Awards Productions (a joint venture of the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing) has communicated with us that they are altering this year’s show to conform with specific requests from the WGA, and therefore the WGA will not be picketing the show,” the guild said. “As they have stood by us, we stand with our fellow workers on Broadway who are impacted by our strike.”

Along with a message of solidarity for the Broadway community, the statement placed responsibility for the waiver denial on CBS and Paramount.

“Responsibility for having to make changes to the format of the 2023 Tony Awards rests squarely on the shoulders of Paramount/CBS and their allies,” the statement said. “They continue to refuse to negotiate a fair contract for the writers represented by the WGA.”

The news comes the same day as the Tony Awards Management Committee decided it would appeal to the WGA and request that the striking writers not picket the televised awards ceremony to potentially move forward with the broadcast. That followed a decision on Friday by the guild to deny the show’s producers a waiver to proceed with the televised ceremony during the ongoing strike.

In response to the news, Actor’s Equity president Kate Shindle thanked WGA West and East on Twitter before encouraging Equity members “to double down on showing up at their pickets.”

“Oh, and because it can’t be said enough: this is still #AMPTP’s fault, and the writers should never have been put in this position,” she continued. “We can appreciate the grace AND point at the culprits, right?”

The 76th Annual Tony Awards ceremony was scheduled to take place June 11 at the United Palace in New York City, and set to air on CBS, from 8-11 p.m. ET/5- 8 p.m. PT and also stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to CBS and reps the Tonys for comment.

May 15, 8:03 p.m. Updated with social media statement from Actor’s Equity president Kate Shindle.

As well as bagging four Oscars and nine BAFTAs, Edward Berger’s WW1 drama All Quiet on the Western Front cemented its place in pop-culture history by becoming an internet meme. Under ‘how it started’, the meme shows the film’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), as a laughing, idealistic new recruit. But then, under ‘how it’s going’, we see the same young soldier, now hollowed out, filthy, and traumatized by the carnage he’s seen.

For Berger, however, everything’s going just fine. Hours after celebrating his BAFTA win at London’s Royal Festival Hall, the director was on a flight to Italy to resume work on his follow-up, Conclave. Adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, it stars Ralph Fiennes in a modern-day thriller about the power struggle that ensues after the death of a fictional pope. Filming inside the 15^th-century Vatican is forbidden, but Berger found a place that’s just as holy: the legendary Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where Stage 15 has become a full-scale replica of the interior of the Sistine Chapel.

The ceiling will be added in post, but the attention to detail is extraordinary, especially when the extras arrive. The day we meet, Berger is directing the vote for a new pope, and the set is awash with men in white cassocks and scarlet zucchettos. It’s a simple scene, but Berger has it all storyboarded, and his perfectionism starts to show when one of the featured background artists fails to hit his mark (“Find me someone who can walk normally,” he whispers to his First A.D.). Oscar night is less than three weeks away, but Berger isn’t stressing about that either, as the room is given a top-up spray of “atmos”.

In person, he is a cheerful, unassuming chap in his early 50s, but this easygoing exterior is deceptive: Edward Berger is not afraid to say no. And the first thing he said no to was what life seemed to have in store for him. “I come from Wolfsburg, a fairly small city in Germany,” he says. “They build Volkswagen cars there, and that’s all they do. Everyone works for Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, so, usually, in that city, you become an engineer, a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. You get a proper job.” The third of four children — three boys and a girl — Berger thought he’d do that too; his father was an engineer (at Volkswagen), as were his older brothers. Still, they were an arts-leaning family, and they encouraged Berger in his love of theater. “I always loved movies, too, but I didn’t have a clue how they were made. I thought the actors made them.”

He was 14 when the scales fell from his eyes after a trip to the art school in nearby Braunschweig. “They had a film course,” he recalls, “and people were walking around with cameras. It was the first time I realized how you make a movie.”

His teenage awakening, however, wasn’t like The Fabelmans. “I started slowly, not like Spielberg re-enacting movies. I had a Super-8 camera and a video camera. It was all awfully terrible and not full-time.” He also started writing, and the play he wrote at 15 offers some clues to his later decision to adapt Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet. “It was terribly pretentious,” he admits. “It was called Carthage. I had the idea from [playwright] Bertolt Brecht, who said that the great state of Carthage fought three wars: after the first war, it crumbled; after the second war, it was barely existent; and in the third war, it was destroyed. It was obviously a metaphor for Germany.”

At 18, Berger surprised his father by enrolling in an engineering degree in Berlin (“He was like, ‘Really? Engineering?’”). His father’s instincts proved right. “I went for the first day, which was a prep course in math. I sat and listened to it and thought, ‘That’s not for me.’ So, I left and went to that art school in Braunschweig.”

After Braunschweig, Berger moved to New York in the early ’90s to study film at the Tisch School, but after graduating in ’94, he was at a loose end. “I’d watched a lot of independent movies in school, and New York was the independent hub. A lot of the movies I loved came from one company in particular, Good Machine, and so I knocked on their door.” Anthony Bregman, now an acclaimed producer, opened it. It was a tiny company that employed just eight people. “I started as an unpaid intern,” says Berger. “I did photocopies and errands for three months, and that turned into my first job.”

He stayed there for a year and a half, earning $400 a week, and the crunch came when he was offered a job as a production supervisor on Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm. “It was, like, $2,400 a week or some insane amount of money. I started stuttering, and I said, ‘I can’t do it.’” Why not? “If I’d taken it, I wouldn’t be a director today.”

Berger, quite correctly, knew it was time to go. “It was the best time,” he says. “But you also felt you were at the end of it. I had an apartment on the Bowery, and the Angelika Film Center was around the corner. There was a film market there every year or so. I saw all these independent filmmakers, with their flyers, running by my apartment, and I could see their desperation, like wet soap was slipping from their fingers. Most of them ended up with a massive credit card bill and an unsold movie.”

Like Fritz Lang before him, Berger decided to go home. “I went back one summer and thought, ‘Wow, life is happening here, and it’s cheap.’ I also thought, ‘I’m not American; what am I doing in New York? I don’t have a story to tell there.’” A summer in Berlin inspired him to write a film called Gomez: Heads or Tails, that took place there and got it funded very quickly. “It was about a kid growing up in Berlin who ends up in a knife fight in the subway. I forget what happens in the end.” He shrugs. “I think he dies.”

Immediately, he hit a rock. “I realized I didn’t have anything to say afterward.” And though his next film, a romantic comedy, cost 10 times as much (“I had four million Deutschmarks back then, which was a lot”), he still wasn’t satisfied. “It was shallow,” he sighs. “It did OK, but it was just mediocre. It wasn’t the movie I’d hoped I was making, and I also realized that I didn’t quite know yet how to use storytelling tools.”

Television was a good place for him to learn that, but a dangerously seductive one. “The German system sucks you up,” he says, “because television is so powerful, and there’s hardly any movies made. You get opportunities with actors that you’ve grown up with, which is amazing. But you don’t realize how, bit by bit, you’re drifting away from your ideals, like the ones I had at Good Machine. You get excited, and then when it’s finished, you realize, ‘Oh, it’s just a television movie. Let’s do the next one, and it’ll be better.’ So, you put all your heart and soul into it — and you make another television movie. Now, I learned a lot about directing in that time. But after 10 years, I realized if I continued doing that, I’d just be a television director.”

The biggest lesson he’d learned was that the movie has to come from inside you, and inspiration finally struck when he gave up on the next script he was writing. “I had a crisis,” he says. “I couldn’t finish it, so I played soccer with my son in the garden instead. And one Sunday afternoon, I saw a kid walking by with a backpack. My kid said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. He’s in my class. On Friday nights, he goes to stay with his mom, and on Sunday nights, he goes back to the children’s home.’ I was so moved by this kid — he was smiling and waving and walking towards the sunset — I thought, ‘Look at him. Stop complaining about your stupid script and write another one.’”

The new script, Jack, told the story of a 10-year-old boy struggling to hold his single-parent family together and premiered in Competition at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, giving Berger his first taste of legitimacy. It also set the director on a new course when he read the script for a mini-series called Deutschland ’83, about a young East German sent to the West as a spy by the Stasi. “It was the first script I’d read in Germany that felt international,” he says. “All the other offers felt kind of smaller, but this one was more irreverent toward history, more fun, and that’s what attracted me.”

Ironically, although Berger thought he was trying to leave TV behind, the success of Deutschland ’83 coincided with the rise of a new, upmarket kind of TV and actually led to more. He followed it in 2018 with AMC’s The Terror and, the series closest to his heart, Showtime’s Patrick Melrose, based on Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels about a privileged man from a broken home. “I’d read those books when I was at Good Machine, rollerblading home from work, and I just became such a fan.”

Berger soon learned to trust his instincts, and when producer Malte Grunert came to him in 2020 with All Quiet he jumped at the chance. It was “an urge”, he says. “We wanted to tell that story and share it. We wanted to speak of our youth and the feelings we’d grown up with. The guilt and the shame. The responsibility. It all went into that movie.”

Looking back, does he see a pattern? “Different projects pull me in different directions,” he says. “That’s my compass. I’m not catering to an audience. After All Quiet I thought, you know what? Next time, I want to make something entertaining. At the end of All Quiet it’s just silence. There’s no music. I really had the urge to make a movie where I could put a pop song on and have people get up and say, ‘That was fun. Let’s go have a drink.’” And after Conclave? “I’ll probably want to do something different again.”