Chad Stahelski, the director of four “John Wick” movies with Keanu Reeves, spent the majority of his “John Wick: Chapter 4” press tour earlier this year urging the Academy to create an Oscar category for stunt work. At the time, the filmmaker said the main problem behind the Oscars not awarding stunt performers was that no conversations were taking place behind the scenes for them to do so. It now appears Stahelski is changing that.
In a recent interview with ComicBookMovie to mark the Blu-ray release of “John Wick: Chapter 4,” Stahelski announced that conversations about a stunt Oscar have finally taken place “in the last couple of months” between the Academy and a contingent of stunt coordinators.
“We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations, and, to be honest, it’s been nothing but incredibly positive, incredibly instructional,” Stahelski said. “I think, for the first time, we’ve made real movement forward to making this happen.”
Stahelski said he believes a stunt Oscar “can happen as soon as, you know, the next Oscars, or at least the one after that. At the latest, the next three or four years.”
“The question is, we haven’t had the real talks about how do you even determine what to award,” Stahleski said. “Like is it for best stunt? Is it best choreography? Best action sequence? Best stunt ensemble? Does the stunt coordinator get it? The guy doing the gag get it? The martial arts choreographer? The fight choreography? The stunt double? The second unit director? The editor? Who gets the award? All these are great questions that just need to be talked about by smart individuals on both sides of it, the stunt community and the Academy.”
Stahleski noted that on “John Wick” he had three fight choreographers. So would each person get an Oscar? These are the details that need to be ironed out.
“For the last three months, we’ve been talking to members of the Academy, getting this huge machine up and running to have these discussions and, again, to be open and fair about both sides,” the director told ComicBookMovie. “Both sides have been incredibly positive. There is no one that we’ve met so far that thinks antagonistically to this like everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen. It’s just how do we do it as fair and as thought out as possible.”
Professionals and media journalists have widely respected stunts in the Hollywood industry, calling for the Oscars to instate a category that recognizes the achievement for quite some time. Earlier this year, the Board of Governors of the Academy created the Production and Technology Branch, comprised of 400 individuals who work in several key technical and production positions. Almost 100 of these individuals are stunt coordinators.
Creating a new Academy branch specifically for stunt coordinators must go through a process through the Academy’s Membership Committee. The Academy’s leadership and its Board of Governors have been open to working with its membership on assessing the various disciplines that can be included in its awards initiatives and continue to do so.
One clear positive for including a stunt category is another opportunity for the Oscars to recognize more populist and action-genre films that often get left out of top categories like best picture, specifically Marvel and other superhero and comic book movies. If a stunt category was already implemented for the 2024 Oscars, top box office grossers such as “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and Stahelski’s “John Wick: Chapter 4” would be near the top of PvNew’s list of awards contenders.
The 96th Academy Awards are already scheduled for March 10, 2024.
