A Best Stunts Oscar is long overdue

It looked like it was finally going to happen. At last night’s Academy Awards, after a fun back-and-forth with Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling — who stars with her as a stuntman character in this year’s The Fall Guy — said “We’re here to celebrate the stunt community. They’ve been such a crucial part of our industry, since the beginning of cinema.”

In a subsequent video, narrated by Gosling, paid tribute to the best of stunts work for the past hundred years, showing clips from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to John Wick, Fast & The Furious, RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and more. Particular highlights were the clips of the record-breaking Aston Martin roll in Casino Royale, where stunt double Adam Kirley flipped and rolled the DBS seven times, and the alley jump shot from The Bourne Ultimatum.

“Cinema’s first directors were stuntmen in their own right, and action was the lifeblood of their story,” Gosling narrated over the clips. “The Academy’s history runs deep with the incredible work of the fearless artisans of the stunt community, and every award season features their work, in every genre.” 

It was a fabulous tribute, and the perfect time to announce that the Academy would be finally catching up with the time, doing the right thing, and introducing a Best Stunts category. After a century of amazing stunt filmmaking, “the unsung heroes who risk life and limb for cinema,” as Blunt described them, would finally be honoring by the premier film awards body for their incredible work.

But that didn’t happen. It was just a nice shoutout. Though the Academy will “celebrate” and “salute” them, it won’t award them. They would remain “unsung,” after all.

Bilge Ebiri at Vulture has made the case for a Best Stunts Oscar since 2019, echoing a call that has long been made within the industry. Ebiri credits it to Sidney Lumet, who — in 1991 — “wondered aloud to stunt coordinator Jack Gill why there was no Oscar category for stunt work.” In the more than thirty years since, Gill has continued to push this effort, but the Academy hasn’t budged — despite the obvious merit of the craft, the declining ratings of each Oscars broadcast and the dominance that action films have in both the film discourse and box office returns. Ebiri went beyond mere words in his advocacy by introducing an annual Stunts Awards at Vulture, celebrating a swath of stunt achievements through the years, including those from 2023 — but Vulture picking up the slack only makes it so much more obvious that the Academy needs to introduce a “Best Stunts” category.

Instead of more canned segments with Jimmy Kimmel (no, we don’t care Trump tweeted about you or that Guillermo likes tequila), they could have given an award to the team behind John Wick 4, directed by former stuntman and stun coordinator Chad Stehelski. Other nominees for Best Stunts likely would have been Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Extraction 2, Fist of the Condor, Ballerina, and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning — Part 1.

As Gosling ended his narration: “From the depths of space to the battlefields of earth, and beyond, stunt performers and the action they design continue to create some of the most memorable moments in the history of cinema. And they’ve been doing it from the start.”

He’s not wrong. So give them an award for it.