Still No Stunt Oscar
By Dan Brown It’s 2026. The world changes every day. And yet there’s still no Academy Award for stunt performers. In fact, the stunt-design category for the Oscars won’t be handed out until 2028, which marks one century of the bloated Hollywood awards show. By then, those who literally put their bodies on the line to create convincing movie action scenes will have waited a full 100 years to be recognized by the Academy. I was thinking about this when the Oscar nominations were announced last week. You may have heard or read something about this year’s nods. The biggest headline emerging out of the press conference was that a vampire flick, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, got 16 nominations – making it the most-nominated film in the history of Hollywood. That’s more nods than Titanic ever got, or The Godfather or Ben-Hur. It sounds like an impressive achievement until you look a little more closely. Although fall guys and gals won’t get much-deserved recognition until two years from now, the Oscars did add one new category this time: The honour for best casting. So with one extra category, the odds of ANY film breaking the record for most Oscars went up a bit this year. Sure enough, one of the nods for Sinners is in the casting division. I’m not saying casting directors don’t work hard or don’t have an impact on a movie’s success. But the fact the stunt Oscar has been delayed for so many years tells you a lot about Tinseltown’s priorities. Compared to other awards shows, the Oscars are way behind the times. According to a report in the Guardian, the Actor Awards (formerly called the Screen Actors Guild Awards) already have a stunt-ensemble trophy for both film and television. And the Emmy Awards give prizes to both the outstanding stunt coordinator and outstanding stunt performer. As no less an authority than Jason Statham once said, it’s an injustice that “poncy actors” standing in front of a green screen get rewarded for their onscreen fakery while stunt performers remain anonymous. These folks jump from buildings, get set on fire, make fights look authentic, yet they toil in obscurity. It’s almost like the Hollywood elite don’t want them to become household names, alongside the actors they represent on the silver screen. Stunt workers are cinema’s second-class citizens despite the crucial role they play. You might even think actors and actresses don’t want to share the glory by the way they continue to perpetuate the fiction that A-list stars do their own stunts. If you’ve seen a motion picture lately, more than likely it has scenes that called for stunt work – even in this age of computer-generated imagery. Yet when was the last time you heard a big-name star boast in an interview, “Do my own stunts? Are you kidding? No way am I putting my butt on the line!!!” Besides, it’s not like the insurance company would let them. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
But What About the Movie?
By Dan Brown Movie advertising in 2025 is about everything but the movie. What I mean is, the folks in Tinseltown who devise campaigns to advertise big-budget motion pictures, like the latest Mission: Impossible and the upcoming Superman, want the public to be aware of some important details – that have little to do with the content of each film. Why is this a problem? Because Hollywood isn’t exactly doing blockbuster business in the age of streaming. Let me make clear at the outset that I’ve never worked in marketing: This is a civilian take from someone who has never made a movie ad or trailer in his life. All I’m basing my thoughts on are my decades of experience as a moviegoer and movie fan. Let’s start with the obvious example, the publicity campaign for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which landed in theatres last month. Whether you’ve seen it yet or not, you already know one thing about this sequel – that Tom Cruise did his own stunt work. You know this factoid because long before Cruise appeared at the Cannes Film Festival or on TV chat shows, Cruise was bragging about it in online clips that appeared while he was still on location two years ago. What he didn’t talk about while hanging off a brightly coloured biplane was the movie’s premise, or his acting in it, or the script. Or any other detail. Doing his own stunts may be a foolish thing for an actor to do, I don’t know, but I do know it’s an odd claim to make since an action star risking certain death in real life and Cruise’s character risking his on-screen life are two different things. What are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Or think of it this way: Did anyone who bought a ticket to see Final Reckoning walk out of the theatre and say to their date, “That movie was pretty mediocre, but I’m just glad knowing Tom Cruise risked life and limb to make it.” As Peter Suderman over at Reason magazine said in his review, the Mission: Impossible films are “ extravagant stunt spectacles, powered by the awe of watching an aging movie star appear to risk his life for our entertainment.” Not by the plot, or the camera work, or anything else intrinsic to the movie. Another example. As Cruise did, many movie actors appear on TV shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to drum up interest in their latest work. One question that always comes up while this promoting goes on is how much fun the performers had while making the upcoming feature. This must be very important, as I have never once heard a celebrity plugging the fact they had a bad time on set. There are inevitably anecdotes about what a riot it was to work on the production, and if George Clooney is involved in any way, there will be a story about how he pulled pranks on his co-stars during shooting. Again, does this factor in anyone’s decision to see a particular film over another? Does anyone exiting the movie say, “That was a fantastic film, and knowing the cast had a fun time makes me want to see it again.” Not to be cold, but I don't care. As a moviegoer I just want to be entertained. If a movie is strong, it doesn’t matter to me whether the cast was having fun or utterly miserable. I don’t care. I just want my money’s worth of entertainment. Heck, Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now, which can’t have been fun, but I don’t think that fact alone interfered with anyone’s enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the Vietnam War epic. A final example. Word has also reached my online feeds, maybe yours too, how actor David Corenswet put on a large amount of muscle while preparing to play Superman in the James Gunn-directed picture that will reset the DC cinematic universe this summer. These posts show Corenswet pumping iron. Again, I’m not sure what to do with this news nugget. It would be like, if Raging Bull was released today, the studio first released video of Robert De Niro stuffing his face in order to gain the necessary weight to play Jake LaMotta in his over-the-hill years. If publicity tactics like these come across as acts of desperation to you, then I agree. What happened to traditional trailers that tried to give you a sense of the flavour of the film, that boasted about intriguing characters, talented directors and the script’s twists and turns? All of this is another sign Hollywood is in crisis, with the big studios still hurting from the pandemic years and unable to supply a compelling answer to the rise of streaming as the dominant method of entertainment. They’ll do anything to put butts in seats. Now, I’m no marketing genius. But I do see one ploy the Hollywood big brains haven’t used yet that just might work: Try making better movies. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
