An Oscar For Stunts? The Hard (But Not Impossible) Fight For An Academy Award

Since Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s poster boy for risking your life on screen, first dangled from the Burj Khalifa in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the franchise’s entire marketing blitz has been built around his next big stunt. Whole franchises, like John Wick, have sprung up around the idea of escalating action cinema with practical stunt work and ever-more-ridiculous fight choreography. Directors like Chad Stahelski and Sam Hargrave are fostering some incredible stunt work and forcing an issue with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences… Why isn’t there an Oscar for Stunts?

We spent the better part of 2023 asking everybody we could about that question, from Mission: Impossible to Indiana Jones, Fast and Furious to Extraction. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Keanu Reeves, Chris Hemsworth, Hayley Atwell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Scott Eastwood, Louis Leterrier, Christopher McQuarrie and more all weighed in, while we dug in to the Academy Bylaws to see how tough a job the stunt community has ahead of itself to get their own category on Oscar Night!

This video was written and produced by Clint Gage, edited by Justin Donaldson, with graphics and animation by Casey Redmon. The interviews were conducted by Scott Collura, Jim Vejvoda, Stella Chung, Tom Jorgensen, Tyler Robertson and Mat Jones