It’s Time for a Best Stunts Oscar

It’s Time for a Best Stunts Oscar,After 28 years of stuntpeople lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an annual category for Best Stunts remains elusive. Why?

It’s Time for a Best Stunts Oscar

This article originally ran in 2019. We are republishing it on the occasion of Vulture’s inaugural Stunt Awards.

Believe it or not, it was all Sidney Lumet’s idea. In 1991, while working on A Stranger Among Us, the legendary director of Network, Dog Day Afternoon, and 12 Angry Men wondered aloud to his stunt coordinator Jack Gill why there was no Oscar category for stunt work. When Gill had no answers for him, Lumet decided the first step would be to sponsor him for membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). There, Gill learned that in order to be considered for an Oscar category, he’d first need to have a stunts branch established, then get enough members in that branch to potentially vote for nominations in the category. AMPAS higher-ups told him the process “could take as long as three or four years.”

That was over 30 years ago. Gill is still trying to get the Oscars to recognize stunts. Which is a bit surprising when you consider that during that time (1) the film industry has become completely dominated by action movies, which are heavily reliant on stunts, and (2) the Oscars have struggled with decreased viewership and an increased sense of irrelevance, as evidenced by their occasional attempts to find ways to honor more big blockbusters. You would think the Academy’s Board of Governors would have put two and two together by this point and established a Best Stunts category. But no. “When I first approached them, they were extremely eager to help,” Gill says. “As the years went on, they got tired of me. Now it’s hard to even get a meeting.”

Oscar’s cold shoulder notwithstanding, there has always been a whiff of romance around the figure of the Hollywood stuntman. “Throw him off a building, light him on fire, hit him with a Lincoln! He’s just happy for the opportunity,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s weathered actor Rick Dalton says of his easygoing stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. (The movie marks yet another entry in the director’s ongoing fascination with stuntpeople. See also: 2007’s Death Proof, which featured real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell playing a fictional version of herself doing battle with a psychotic stuntman played by Kurt Russell. They appear as a husband-and-wife stunt duo in Once Upon a Time.) In one of the film’s more touching scenes, we see the poverty in which Cliff lives — in a cluttered, rundown trailer, eating (admittedly delicious-looking) instant mac and cheese, in sharp contrast to his movie-star boss and best friend. It’s a sly acknowledgement that Cliff pretty much does everything yet sees few of the upsides. Even at the end — spoiler alert — after the carnage of the finale, we see Cliff being taken away in an ambulance, while Rick reaps the benefits of his actions and appears to get a newfound lease on his floundering career.

“It’s weird when films like The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road are nominated for all those Oscars and you’re sitting there thinking, Half of that is us.”Photo: Warner Bros.

So why the hell hasn’t it happened yet? Even Gill himself isn’t sure. He recalls a fellow Academy member in another branch who offered to help one year. “He had a real foot in the door, and he said, ‘I think it’s a great idea, and I’m going to help in any way I can.’” But after meeting with some other higher-ups at AMPAS, Gill says, this colleague came back and said, “They told me, right to my face, ‘You’ve got to let it go. It’s never going to happen.’” Other friends of Gill’s who’ve been board members tell him that AMPAS regularly puts the vote for creating a Stunts category at the end of a seven- or eight-hour meeting.

All this suggests that there might be another, possibly more troubling reason why this category keeps getting rejected. Even though stunts have been around since the earliest days of cinema, and the work of daredevil riders and slapstick comedians practically built Hollywood, for years stuntpeople were seen as the underclass of the film industry — disposable working stiffs, not real artists or craftspeople or technicians. Tania Cardwell, who worked with Lisk-Hann on helping get a Best Stunts award approved in Canada, recalls that people in their profession once had to sign what was called “a blood sheet,” promising they would not seek any legal recourse if they died or were injured.

Could issues of social class be feeding into the Academy’s ongoing refusal to award them? “I’ve never said this publicly, but in the back of my mind that’s always been an issue,” Gill says. “When I go into the meetings, they don’t want to talk to me. It does sometimes feel like you’re going into a room that doesn’t want you to be there. It’s like belonging to a very elite golf course, where you can look at the course but you can never play.” To be sure, stunt workers are well compensated nowadays, and many of them are quite financially successful. “But there is this sense that [actors are] artists, while we’re the ones who fall down for a living,” says Randy Butcher, who has worked on films like xXx: Return of Xander Cage and Suicide Squad and was the coordinator for Orphan Black.

AMPAS, by nature of its membership, is a fairly conservative organization and generally changes quite slowly. While the perception of stunts and the people who perform them has been changing in the industry at large, it may well be that many key members of the Academy still subscribe to an old way of thinking — one that sees stunts not as an art or a science but as a kind of infrastructural necessity, like the Teamsters who drive the trucks.

But we’ve also seen AMPAS enact radical change at times. Occasionally, this results in disaster. Witness last year’s roller coaster — from the silly dalliance with a Best Popular Film category, to a brief attempt to keep previous winners from presenting the awards, to that truly calamitous, mercifully short-lived initiative to delete key categories from the broadcast (to say nothing of all the hosting issues). Many of these were dramatic attempts to address ongoing, systemic issues (and, to be fair, some of them were decisions by the producers of the live Oscars show, not AMPAS itself), but they had little public support. A Best Stunts category, however, would be a popular decision. It would also be a correct one. It would acknowledge some of the more audience-friendly films of the year and present a long-overdue award to one of Hollywood’s oldest and most important professions — a job that seems to be both romanticized and disrespected in equal measure.