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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.

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