Hollywood's best stunt performers deserve to get an Oscar thrill
After more than seven decades of the Academy Awards, we're pretty much accustomed to the Oscar voters getting things wrong -- such as Julia Roberts winning best actress for ''Erin Brockovich" in 2001 over Ellen Burstyn in ''Requiem for a Dream." This time, however, it's the officials, not the voters, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who are responsible for the latest blunder.
Frank Pierson, the academy's president, announced last week that its board of governors rejected a proposal to create a new Oscar category to honor stunt performers. As the academy is ''more focused on reduction than addition," Pierson said, ''the board is simply not prepared to institute any new awards categories."
Such logic didn't stop the academy from adding a best animated feature film category in 2000. Still, anyone who has slogged through one of those interminable Oscar telecasts wouldn't mind seeing the ceremonies trimmed to, perhaps, a maximum of three hours, and even that's pushing it. Yet it would make more sense to eliminate such fat as the usually dull musical numbers -- c'mon, people, did this year's show really need Beyonce performing three of the five nominated songs? -- than to continue to deny recognition to men and women creating some of the most indelible moments in film history.
Filmmakers and actors, including Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Steven Spielberg, supported the proposal submitted by several stunt performers' organizations for a best stunt coordinator category. A statement on the Stunts Unlimited website, representing stuntmen, coordinators, and action directors, laments stunt performers going ''unnoticed and unrewarded" by the academy. And there's also the hard-to-argue contention that stuntmen and stuntwomen ''are the only faction of the movie industry that must literally risk their lives for the sake of their art."
Those who are willing to leap from buildings, be set on fire, or maneuver careering cars through traffic during a high-speed chase -- and do so to make some much-better-compensated famous face look good -- deserve more than a shrug from the academy.
It's summer, the time when filmmakers are more concerned with spectacle than intellectually salient and serious movies, and thus the high season for stunt performers. Even with the prevalence of CGI -- computer-generated imagery -- some of the best stunts are still performed by actual people. And for all the wonders of CGI, more often than not it can make movies look like the video games they will eventually become.
In 1960, ''Ben-Hur" swept the Academy Awards, winning 11 Oscars, including best picture, best actor (Charlton Heston), and best director (William Wyler). Yet what most people remember about this biblical epic is the dramatic chariot race between Heston's Judah Ben-Hur and his friend-turned-rival Messala, played by Stephen Boyd. Of course, we see Heston and Boyd only in close-ups, while their stunt doubles do all the real work, which was plotted and choreographed for two years by legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt.
Yet while the film received an award for best special effects, neither Canutt nor his stunt teams received any academy recognition for what remains one of the greatest action scenes in motion picture history. (Canutt was given a special citation in 1960 for his direction of the chariot race by the National Board of Review; in 1966, he received an honorary Oscar for ''achievements as a stuntman and for developing safety devices to protect stuntmen everywhere.")
Nearly 50 years later, the academy is still deluding itself into believing that stunt people aren't a vital, necessary part of the film community. At next year's ceremony, count just how many fantastic stunts -- whether it's the white-knuckle car chase from ''The French Connection" or Steve McQueen's iconic motorcycle jump in ''The Great Escape," actually performed by stuntman Bud Ekins -- are included in all those lengthy hooray-for-Hollywood montages.
When it comes to self-congratulations, Hollywood understands just how important those amazing scenes are, yet when it's time to honor the people who plan and execute them, the academy is unwilling to acknowledge their irreplaceable contributions. If, as the Academy Awards like to trumpet every year, their much-ballyhooed night is about celebrating the creativity, the spirit, and especially the magic of the movie industry, then it's time for adequate and respectful recognition for some of their most unheralded magicians.
Renée Graham's Life in the Pop Lane column appears on Tuesdays. She can be reached at graham@globe.com. 
