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This article originally ran in 2019.
We are republishing it on the occasion of Vultures inauguralStunt Awards.
Believe it or not, it was all Sidney Lumets idea.
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.
When I first approached them, they were extremely eager to help, Gill says.
As the years went on, they got tired of me.
Now its hard to even get a meeting.
Throw him off a building, light him on fire, hit him with a Lincoln!
(The movie marks yet another entry in the directors ongoing fascination with stuntpeople.
They appear as a husband-and-wife stunt duo inOnce Upon a Time.)
Its a sly acknowledgement that Cliff pretty much does everything yet sees few of the upsides.
Stunts are even used to market these pictures.
TheMission: Impossiblefranchisehas been sold to us largely on the power of its real-life stunts.
There are a handful of actors that do like to do their own stunts.
They train the actor for months.
The stunt coordinators are responsible for keeping everyone safe.
Some stunt professionals have even graduated to helming entire features.
The firstJohn Wickwas directed by former coordinators David Leitch and Chad Stahelski.
Meanwhile, stunts are being honored more and more by other parts of the industry.
In 2007, the Screen Actors Guild introduced a Best Stunt Ensemble award.
Its too bad that its not the same down south, she says.
All of us here are kind of shocked.
But several stuntmen have won special Oscars before.
But an annual Oscar category for Best Stunts remains elusive.
Nowadays, a lot of actors are publicly giving their doubles more credit, notes Carleton.
And because were helping design the action and direct it, its much more of a team effort.
He dismisses that as absurd.
The special-effects comparison is an interesting one.
The VFX guys are on our side, says Gill.
We work hand in hand with them.
With more VFX movies being made, Im using more stuntpeople than I ever use.
So why the hell hasnt it happened yet?
Even Gill himself isnt sure.
He recalls a fellow Academy member in another branch who offered to help one year.
Its never going to happen.
All this suggests that there might be another, possibly more troubling reason why this category keeps getting rejected.
Could issues of social class be feeding into the Academys ongoing refusal to award them?
When I go into the meetings, they dont want to talk to me.
It does sometimes feel like youre going into a room that doesnt want you to be there.
To be sure, stunt workers are well compensated nowadays, and many of them are quite financially successful.
AMPAS, by nature of its membership, is a fairly conservative organization and generally changes quite slowly.
But weve also seen AMPAS enact radical change at times.
Occasionally, this results in disaster.
A Best Stunts category, however, would be a popular decision.
It would also be a correct one.
