It’s a lousy argument, not to mention an offensive one.
Photo: Universal Pictures
When Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt appeared at the 2024 Oscars to pay tribute to Hollywood’s stunt professionals, they had two aims. One was, of course, to help promote their film, The Fall Guy, which stars Gosling as a down-on-his-luck stuntman. But they were also there to implicitly draw attention to the fact that there still was no Oscar for Best Stunts, despite the fact that stuntpeople built Hollywood before there were any real movie stars. A song about how there’s still no Oscar for Best Stunts even plays over the end credits of The Fall Guy, which, of course, was directed by stunt-professional turned director David Leitch.
Some of us have been a broken record about this issue for years now. We started the Vulture Stunt Awards two years ago for that reason. I first wrote about the issue for Vulture in 2019, and that itself was a follow-up to a blog post I wrote in 2011 (which was itself inspired by an ongoing petition). Over the years, we’ve heard every reason why there shouldn’t be a Best Stunts Oscar: The ceremony is too long! There are too many categories! Nobody cares about stunts! We celebrate art and stunts aren’t art! This is just an excuse to give Tom Cruise an Oscar! Blah, blah, blah.
All of these arguments have, over the years, mostly proven hollow and fallen by the wayside. And the Academy has recently seemed more open to the idea as well. (By the way, an Oscar for stuntwork would likely go to a film’s stunt coordinator, not Tom freaking Cruise.) But there is one that persists. It’s an argument that was really nowhere back in 2011, and it was just a whisper in 2019, although the veteran stunt coordinator Jack Gill, who had been leading the charge for a Stunts Oscar for decades, did say he’d heard it from a couple of people: “If stunt coordinators were given an award, they would start endangering people by trying to craft more and more elaborate stunts.”
Nowadays, it’s the argument one probably hears the most. “One of the bizarre pushbacks I always get whenever I talk about the need for an Academy Award for Stunts is, ‘Oh, now stuntpeople will be risking their lives for an award and that’s bad,’” says one industry veteran who’s worked on some of the biggest films of the past two decades. I’ve heard it myself from several people in the industry.
It’s a lousy argument, not to mention an offensive one. For starters, safety is a stunt team’s first job, and endangering or hurting people would be a pretty good way not to win an Oscar. But perhaps more importantly, and measurably, as stunts have become more recognized over the years, they have become safer. More and more organizations have started to reward stunts over the years, from the Screen Actors Guild to the Emmys to the Canadian Academy. The stunt industry has also given out its own prizes, the Taurus Awards, since 2001. By the logic of the people who think an Oscar would lead to more people getting hurt, stuntpeople should be dying left and right in their desperate efforts to win some of those awards, which are prestigious in their own right.
Let’s be very clear: That has not happened. Quite the opposite. The most dangerous time to be a stuntperson was in the early years of the industry when they were treated as anonymous, disposable stiffs. Until not too long ago, stunt professionals had to sign a “blood sheet,” in which they promised not to sue anyone in case of death or injury. Now, they’re part of the industry, with union protections. When SAG went on strike last year, the stuntworkers were right there with them. And as stunts have become more valued, they have become safer and better. “Recognition improves the quality of the work,” says Winston Duke, who played stunt coordinator Dan Tucker in The Fall Guy. “There’s a reason people advocate to be paid more, because it improves the quality of the work.”
And yet, the thinking that an award would make stunts less safe still persists. I suspect it’s actually old-fashioned Hollywood classism more than anything else. Over the years, some stuntpeople have said that they have often felt like second-class citizens on film sets, though they also admit that this attitude has been changing in recent years. But there is still a segment of the industry (an increasingly smaller one, thankfully) that sees stuntpeople as, well, dumb and unworthy. Their argument could really be rephrased thusly: If stunts got an Oscar, these ignorant yokels will maim and kill themselves breathlessly racing each other for a fancy gold statue. The aforementioned industry vet agrees: “A veteran filmmaker and I were talking about a stunts Oscar,” they say. “He let me talk for five minutes while I made my case. Then he turned to me and said, ‘These people are the dumbest people on set. I don’t want them getting any awards.’”
The supreme irony of it, of course, is that the stunt professionals are actually some of the smartest people on a film set. They’re the ones dealing with math and physics. They have to gauge the density of the sand on a beach when they’re doing a cannon roll and factor in the tides. They’re the nerds calculating wind resistance on their high falls. They’re the ones measuring pressure on airbags and the give on a jump cord and the strength of a limit line. They build their own rigs. They test their own rigs. When you see an actor do a stunt on-camera — yes, even when it’s Tom Cruise doing it — it usually means that a stunt double has performed that stunt first, and tested it, and made all the necessary adjustments, so that old Tom doesn’t accidentally get blown off the plane and become a large brown stain on some poor Norwegian farmer’s turnip field.
Here’s an example of how much work can go into a stunt from The Fall Guy: For his 225-foot truck jump in the climactic sequence of the movie, stunt driver Logan Holladay and the stunt team had to slowly build up to that length over weeks. They started off on a flat surface, with shorter jumps, and extended it by 25 feet each time after Holladay became comfortable with the jump. All along the way, they made adjustments to the shock absorbers and the pressures of the tires, because all of these affect the jump and the landing. “If the wind was over ten miles an hour, it was not doable,” Holladay told me. “If it was blowing head-on, it would send the front of the truck way up in the air. If it was blowing sideways, it would turn you and blow you to the side of the landing ramp, which can be pretty scary.” They eventually moved to the location, and practiced further there, taking further measurements all along the way and constantly making more adjustments. But so much of the stunt involves math and physics that, by the time Holladay actually did the jump onscreen, they knew it could be done and how he would land.
And yes, they are artists as well. Hannah Waddingham, who played the role of producer Gail Meyer in The Fall Guy, found in stunt professionals kindred artistic spirits, because the close-knit nature of their community reminded her of the theater groups where she got her start. “When you’re a theater performer or when you’re a stunt performer, you are an absolute team player, and it’s very much a vocation in time,” she told me. The fact that stunts so often proves to be a thankless job in Hollywood infuriates her. “They have such a ridiculous level of artistry and craft. It is a vocation in life that many of them start from being very little. Hopefully, they will finally get the respect that they are very much long overdue.”
