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The Stunt Awards

Action! Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Videos: Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures

Vulture's Stunt Awards

• Best Stunt in an Action Film
• Best Stunt in a Non-Action Film
• Best Fight
• Best Shootout
• Best Vehicular Stunt
• Best Aerial Stunt
• Best Practical Explosion
• Best Overall Action Film
• Best Achievement in Stunts Overall
• Lifetime Achievement Award

We sometimes talk about stunts as if they are distinct entities from the movies around them — a single, spectacular moment that makes us go “Wow.” Tom Cruise is free-climbing a cliff! Jackie Chan is dangling off a helicopter! A cameraman just followed Matt Damon’s stunt double as he jumped through a window into another building! But it’s unlikely that actual stunt professionals think this way. They will attest that the best stunts (including the aforementioned ones) drive narrative and character as much as costume or production design, and are the result of the very height of collaboration on a film set. The performers, the action designers, the VFX artists, the directors, the cinematographers — all of them work together to create remarkable sequences that are seamlessly integrated into the experience of a movie. Some films, of course, can be built around stunts — think the Mission: Impossible or the John Wick series, both of which will have new entries this year. But even then, the stunts are there to keep us watching, not to take us out of the picture.

Which is why the Academy Awards’ persistent lack of recognition for stunt professionals feels like such an egregious affront. In a year when action-oriented movies including Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are earning nominations for myriad accomplishments, there is still no Best Stunts Oscar, or any category of celebration dedicated to members of stunts departments. A movement to create one has been brewing for over three decades, but the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has yet to institutionalize a dedicated branch of stunt professionals who can nominate their peers. “It’s like belonging to a very elite golf course, where you can look at the course but you can never play,” says Academy member Jack Gill, a legendary stunt professional and a primary force behind the Stunt Oscar movement.

The oversight dates back to the early days of Hollywood, when stunt folks on westerns and war movies were placed at the bottom of the film-set hierarchy, seen as working-class stiffs who were there to fight, fall, and flop, while directors and stars strove for the artistry. The worst of sets required stunt professionals to sign what were called “blood sheets,” promising they would not sue anyone in the case of death or injury. And deaths did happen; 40 stunt-related deaths occurred on U.S. film sets from 1980 to 1990 alone, with little media coverage — a tragic consequence of an industry obsessed, for a time, with keeping alive the illusion that those were always the real stars up there hanging from cliffs or helicopters.

But as Hollywood grew, so too did the action blockbuster genre, incorporating ever more impressive feats in franchises and metaverses that were impossible to pass off as effortless. Today, actors like Cruise and Keanu Reeves no longer feel it necessary to pretend as though they are pulling off jaw-dropping acts alone, explicitly promoting the work happening behind the scenes to ensure safety and precision. Chad Stahelski, the director of the John Wick films, first met Reeves when he worked as the actor’s stunt double on the Matrix films. “After The Matrix, I went from an average stunt guy to one of the biggest choreographers in the business,” Stahelski told me. Still, even as the Jason Stathams and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the business have stood up in support of a Best Stunt Oscar over the years, AMPAS has yet to yield.

While we at Vulture can’t rectify this, we can launch our own honors. Enter: The Stunt Awards, created from a desire to not only highlight great stunt work over the past year (and there was great stunt work this year), but to underscore the obvious awards-worthiness of action storytelling. To do so, we created our own academy of voters, a combination of stunt professionals, filmmakers, cinematographers, visual effects artists, and critics. They considered stunt work in feature-length films released between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022, appraising inpiduals scenes and performances, as well as movies on the whole, across 10 different categories. A smaller group of consultants including Gill, director and writer Liam O’Donnell, stunt coordinator and second unit director Angelica Lisk-Hann, and visual effects artist Todd Vaziri helped us to decide what those categories would be — making clear that aerial and vehicular feats deserve to be distinctly celebrated, and that great fights and great shoot-outs are their own art forms. Importantly, this group emphasized that stunts did not need to be purely practical to qualify for our awards. The massive fight sequence that serves as actor Ram Charan’s introduction in RRR, for example, might have involved VFX, but it took 35 days to actually film.

The sheer breadth of the movies nominated by our academy proved that stunts aren’t just for action movies. Today, you’re liable to find spectacular stunt work in everything from a gritty French drama about a banlieu uprising, to a studio erotic thriller, to a documentary. And while action bled into almost every studio project, it appeared in plenty of independent movies too, sometimes amounting to a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once, other times one like Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday — both ended up getting nods here. Ahead of final voting, we drew even more members into our academy, some of whom rallied for the stunts that felt dangerously real and enormously entertaining (see: Netflix’s Athena), others to stunts that felt otherworldly or just plain enormous (see: 2023’s Michael Bay release). In the end, the winners (and their runners-up) speak to how fundamental stunt work has become to the experience of enjoying a film, and how much damn fun it is to relive a year in action.

Stunt Awards

Best Stunt in an Action Film

Awarded to a specific sequence in an action film that exemplifies the work of a stunt-coordination team.

Photo: Netflix

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The Nominees

-Scott Adkins
-Jerome Gaspard
-Kevin LaRosa II
-Andy and Brian Le
-Jordan McKnight
-Amber Midthunder
-Nick Powell
-Solomon Raju
-Jenel Stevens
-Michelle Yeoh

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The Winner

Scott Adkins

It’s about time Scott Adkins became a household name. The Birmingham, England–born martial artist and actor has been headlining a particular type of artfully balls-out action movie for years now. (He was the star of 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a deranged, surreal masterpiece that is spoken of in hushed, reverential tones among action nerds. That year, by the way, was also when Jason Statham punched Adkins into a helicopter’s tail rotor.) Adkins’s particular gift is that he can pretty much do anything onscreen; the man is famously trained in six different martial arts. That certainly gives him a certain aura as an actor. “He’s incapable of playing a character who has not at some point in his life snapped someone’s arm in two,” wrote our own Alison Willmore last year. This also means that his films can nonchalantly avoid the predictable cuts required to seamlessly blend the work of stuntmen and stars. Maybe that is why some have taken to calling him The Human Special Effect.

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As the star of Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday (which won our Best Fight category), Adkins got another of these showcases for the persity of his physical feats. The power of this cannot be understated. Something striking happens when you watch a film that is built around sheer human ability. The very grammar of filmmaking is upended, and you simply have no idea what to expect. What you’re watching seems so strange, so unlike anything you’re used to seeing, that it basically reduces you to a state of childhood, watching in open-mouthed astonishment.

This was a huge category, and fairly close behind Adkins in second place was the great Michelle Yeoh, another actor with a stunts and martial arts background, also renowned for her ability to achieve remarkable sequences onscreen without the use of a stunt double. In many ways, with her key roles in the iconic Hong Kong movies of the 1980s and ’90s, Yeoh helped create and establish the kind of filmmaking that made a Scott Adkins possible, and he’d probably be the first to tell you that. She has already been garlanded with many prizes this awards season and may well be on her way to an Oscar win as well, for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Academy may not be giving out an official Best Stunts prize yet — but without stunt work and stuntpeople, their nominations and awards this year would have looked a lot different.

What Our Anonymous Voters Said…

…about the Andy and Brian Le: “Busy year for the Le brothers. Through them, the spirit of old school Hong Kong martial arts films lives on.”

…about Michelle Yeoh: “Action is always best when it is in service to emotion, character, acting and story. Yeoh’s iconic, unprecedented performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once is a combination of all her work in cinema history and one of the most complex, vividly real, imperfect characters she’s ever played.”

Stunt Awards

Lifetime Achievement Award

Read about our first ever Lifetime Achievement winner, Albert Pyun, here.

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