Academy, take action: why there should be an Oscar for best stunts

You could ask a million different people what they want from the Oscars, and you’d get a million different replies. Some would want greater diversity, others for commercial movies to be better recognised. Some would want to see the entire ceremony scrapped altogether and replaced by a list of winners sent out via email, although that last one might just be me. Anyway, the point is that nobody – nobody on Earth – would want the Oscars to be any longer.

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To watch the Oscars these days is to commit to slowly losing all feeling in your lower body. On and on they go, for hours and hours. All the awards. All the speeches. All the montages. All the bits where everyone assembled focuses their willpower to shut out the creeping death of theatrical film-making as a financially viable medium. It goes on a while, and at this stage only an absolute lunatic would want to start adding categories to an already overstuffed dance card.

However, it looks as if this might be happening in the next couple of years. And, perhaps counterintuitively, it is going to improve the Oscars tenfold. This is because the new category will be to celebrate stunt performers.

This has been a long time coming. For years now, outside every major movie awards ceremony around the world, there has been a small group of stunt performers protesting against their lack of recognition. But finally it seems to have paid off. In a recent interview to mark the Blu-ray release of John Wick: Chapter 4, director Chad Stahelski has offered a promising update.

“We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations, and, to be honest, it’s been nothing but incredibly positive, incredibly instructional,” Stahelski told Comic Book Movie. “Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.” And it could happen sooner than later, with Stahelski giving a timeframe of four years or sooner.

Recognition for stunt performers is undoubtedly a good thing. Film as a medium has long relied on the spectacle of watching someone with more guts than sense hurling themselves into the path of danger. This year was the 100th anniversary of Safety Last, in which Harold Lloyd dangled precariously from a number of ledges, and things have only got more spectacular since. The Chariot Race in Ben Hur. Jackie Chan sliding through plate glass and exploding lightbulbs in Police Story. Tom Cruise climbing up the side of the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Every single second of Mad Max: Fury Road. This is the stuff that the entire foundation of cinema was built upon. Of course the performers should be recognised.

Which isn’t to say that this is easy. As Stahelski said in his interview, there is the question of who actually gets the Oscar. Is it the stunt artists? The choreographer? The film’s director? Is the award for best stunt? Best sequence? Best performer? Whatever the decision, some are bound to feel left out. But a step forward is still a step forward.

And the broader hope is that stunt inclusion will breathe some life into the stuffy old Oscars. For years now, the ceremony has slowly begun to eat itself. There are some ceremonies where it feels like the nominated movies were only made to appeal to the conservative middlebrow tastes of the Academy voters, regardless of how popular they are with the broader public. You might not remember which film won best picture four years ago, for instance, but you will remember the sight of all the Avengers clattering into each other at the end of Endgame in the same year. Or Matt Damon driving a car so recklessly in Ford v Ferrari that he reduced Tracy Letts to tears. Or any of the fight scenes from John Wick 3. Or the cliff drop from Midsommar.

Wouldn’t clips of these help to jazz the Oscars up a bit? Rather than watching actors go through the lumbering process of emoting at top volume at each other, in dreary little films about nothing, wouldn’t it be better to just watch a ton of crap explode? Of course it would. And because all these things happened in films that people actually watched, they might feel a sliver of investment in who won. And that might mean that people actually start watching the Oscars again. The inclusion of stunt performers in the Oscars isn’t just a throwaway favour to an underserved community. It’s integral to the survival of the ceremony itself. It cannot happen quickly enough.