Vulture - The Stunt Awards

I was thrilled to be a part of Vulture's inaugural "The Stunt Awards".

The folks at Vulture, like myself, believe strongly in the art and craft of stunt professionals, and find it bizarre there's no Academy Award for this important part of Hollywood storytelling.

Enter: The Stunt Awards, created from a desire to not only highlight great stunt work over the past year (and there was great stunt work this year), but to underscore the obvious awards-worthiness of action storytelling. To do so, we created our own academy of voters, a combination of stunt professionals, filmmakers, cinematographers, visual effects artists, and critics. They considered stunt work in feature-length films released between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022, appraising individuals scenes and performances, as well as movies on the whole, across 10 different categories. A smaller group of consultants including Gill, director and writer Liam O’Donnell, stunt coordinator and second unit director Angelica Lisk-Hann, and visual effects artist Todd Vaziri helped us to decide what those categories would be — making clear that aerial and vehicular feats deserve to be distinctly celebrated, and that great fights and great shoot-outs are their own art forms. Importantly, this group emphasized that stunts did not need to be purely practical to qualify for our awards. The massive fight sequence that serves as actor Ram Charan’s introduction in RRR, for example, might have involved VFX, but it took 35 days to actually film.

Thanks to Bilge Ebiri and Brandon Streussnig for inviting me to the team. It was a blast to discuss the stuntwork of 2022, and also help them sift through the grey area between physical stunts and digital visual effects. The final piece is terrific.

The nominations announcement: https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/introducing-vultures-first-ever-stunt-awards.html

The winner's announcement: https://www.vulture.com/2023/03/vulture-stunt-awards-best-action-scenes-of-2023.html