The New Stunt Oscar Will Likely Morph Into Best Action Design

Following the casting directors' footsteps, the stunt community educated the film community about the craft of action storytelling, which is far more than what the word "stunt" implies.

It finally happened. The Academy announced yesterday that the 2028 Oscar ceremony will hand out the first-ever Best Stunt Design award at the 100th anniversary of the Academy Awards. It’s a move that started to feel inevitable two years ago with the creation of the new Production and Technology Academy branch, which includes stunt professionals and supplied the necessary pathway for the creation of a new category.

The stunt community’s campaign to be part of the Academy in many ways followed the path set by the casting directors, which will premiere its Best Casting Oscar category at the 2026 ceremony. Like the casting directors, it was a fight for recognition of their contributions, and to emerge from the shadows of a profession that has drastically evolved in the last few decades.

In the case of the casting directors, it was the collapse of the studio system and actors being under contract, and the emergence of the independent casting director who built the ensemble from scratch. By casting directors telling the story (and campaigning for Governor Awards career recognition) of pioneers Lynn Stalmaster and Marion Dougherty — who invented the role of the modern casting director in the 1960s and ‘70s — they were also telling the story of their own profession. At the same time, they highlighted how it had evolved from a “glorified human resources position” to being a key creative department vital to a film’s success.

The Academy and stunts community have adapted the talking points of calling out Chaplin, Keaton, or a film like “Ben-Hur.” It’s undeniable that stunts’ integration into cinematic action was engrained from the birth of cinema. But the explosion of the action film genre in the ’80s and ’90s, culminating with “The Matrix” — in which visual effects, the martial arts fighting style and wirework converged to change Hollywood forever — is where the story of the modern-day stunt department emerges.

And it was the generation of stunt professionals who grew out of that “Matrix” industry turning point that led this fight for recognition. “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski — Keanu Reeves’ stunt double on the first “Matrix” film — rose through the ranks as a top stunt coordinator, and then director. He started the influential 87Eleven action design shop with his former partner David Leitch (“Atomic Blonde,” “The Fall Guy”), whose career followed a similar path, as the two men became the tip of the spear and the public face of the campaign.

The 87Eleven-way embraced all styles of international fight choreography, working with actors such as Reeves and Charlize Theron for months ahead of time to shape performance, while meticulously planning, practicing, and designing the action scenes and camerawork during lengthy prep periods. They fully embraced how multifaceted the stunt department had become — overseeing fight choreography with a variety of fight styles, wirework, vehicle and aerial stunts, all the rigging and safety precautions involved with falls, fire, and jumps. Simultaneously, they forged a new frontier in collaborating hand-in-hand with visual effects as a new form of stunt action design emerged in the digital era.

Stahelski and Leitch became the public face of a close-knit community of like-minded stunt professionals, which they helped bring out of the industry’s shadows by talking about their craft and contribution and the history of cinema in a way that was aimed at changing the perception of stunts.

“That was maybe the misconception for the Academy, ‘Well, these guys want awards because they want recognition for these one-off stunts.’ That’s not it. The recognition that we want is [our] artistic contribution to the movie,” said Leitch when he was a guest on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast. “It’s not what you think when you say ‘xXx’ and someone’s space jumping out of a car that’s flying off a bridge, which is also incredibly compelling — Tim Rigby [aerial and vehicle performer, who did the Base jump on ‘xXx’] is one of my best friends. Stunt design is really how it impacts the movie-going experience.”

It’s here that the stunt community’s fight, ironically, veered from that of the casting directors, who notoriously were held back by the Directors Guild of America, led by director and DGA President Taylor Hackford, who tried to minimize the credit casting directors were seeking — even objecting to the use of the word “director” in their title. But in an age when directors pretend in interviews that everything is done practically, and either deny the use of CGI or downplay its contribution, the stunt community’s fight for recognition has been largely embraced by their bosses.

I say it’s ironic because part of what the director is credited for has slowly moved under the stunt coordinators, who often also serve as the second unit director. They not only design the action in front of the camera, but they also design how it is shot. It’s important to note that the work of a second unit director is within the overall vision and visual grammar of the director. That’s why visionary action directors like Leitch and Stahelski have no problem putting their stunt coordinators on a pedestal, praising their contribution the way Quentin Tarantino talks about cinematographer Robert Richardson. And there are directors like Denis Villeneuve and Edgar Wright, who also publicly celebrate their stunt artisans but also can’t completely relinquish their need to be more hands-on with the second unit.

But the reality is that, on a number of big franchise movies, the director is back on a soundstage working with the principal cast on a green screen, while a massive second unit army is out filming the action. There are franchises like Marvel that made the dramatic shift away from hiring the huge action directors who dominated blockbusters in the 1990s and 2000s, and embraced more character-driven writer/directors, in part because they placed so much power and trust in top stunt coordinators and visual effects supervisors to deliver the blockbuster’s necessary spectacle.

Behind the scenes, Leitch and his producing partner and wife Kelly McCormick have been instrumental in getting the Academy to recognize stunts, and their 2024 film “The Fall Guy” was a love letter to the profession, and part of a campaign that was an important last push that put the stunt category over the top. For “Fall Guy,” McCormick worked with Universal, the DGA, and SAG-AFTRA to get the film’s stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara the first-ever “Stunt Designer” credit, which became an ingredient to the campaign for an Oscar category.

The word shift from “coordinator” to “designer” emphasizes the artistry involved with stunts, but it also underlines how all the different aspects of the department are guided by the vision of a head “designer” — not unlike the art department being headed by the production designer rather than a coordinator administering logistics.

“In production design, there’s construction, painters, greenery, there’s any number of things,” McCormick told IndieWire in 2024 in discussing the new stunt design credit. “If we’re talking about the Academy, I go back to the [stunt] coordinator who’s decided which members of the team to bring together to achieve the things the director wants.”

Added O’Hara, “It’s not about an individual’s work. It’s not the guy who designed that set, it’s about the whole big picture of what the production designer has created in the world of the movie. That’s the idea for the Stunt Design category in the Academy: ‘Did the action fit the story? What’s the whole package of the movie?’”

In essence, this is why the stunt design category will ultimately become the award for best action design. The word “stunt” elicits the safe execution of a dangerous feat, like a fall down the stairs, or a car jumping across a ravine. That’s part of what the stunt department does, but under the larger umbrella of action design. As O’Hara points out, the action storytelling, or how “the action fit[s] the story,” will be the criteria for evaluation.