If anyone knows how to take a fall, it’s Cara Marie Chooljian. As a stunt performer in everything from Everything Everywhere All at Once to this Friday’s Ballerina, she’s used to taking blows and getting back up. There’s just one blow she wishes she didn’t have to take, at least not right now—that she won’t win an Oscar.
To be clear, it’s not that she can’t win an Oscar or that she doesn’t have the skill. It’s that until April of this year there just wasn’t a category for stunt performers. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new trophy specifically for stunt design this spring, but no movie will be eligible for the award until 2027—long after Ballerina is out of theaters.
“Kill me,” Chooljian jokes when I ask about the Academy’s announcement and the timing of her latest movie. “I was like, why aren’t we pushing it” back?
Stunt work has been a part of filmmaking since there have been movies. In an industry where actors are literally worth millions of dollars, there’s often someone on set willing to do the really dangerous stuff to save their skin. Many stars—Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise, Chooljian’s Ballerina counterpart Ana de Armas—participate in the stunt work, but for a lot of the big life-or-death action, there’s a double. They’re named in the credits, but because of the nature of their work, they’re also invisible to much of the audience.
Going back to the 1990s, stunt performers have been asking for Academy recognition only to be shut down. But when movies like Furious 7, John Wick, and Mad Max: Fury Road started hitting theaters, the stunts were so unbelievable it became more clear that stunt work was as essential to some movies as the script or director. There was no movie without the action. Still, the creators behind it never got the same Academy recognition as, say, visual effects artists or costume designers.
As part of the John Wick franchise, Ballerina was tailor-made for the Oscars’ new category. In it, Chooljian and de Armas have to fight in every possible scenario with every possible weapon—plates, flamethrowers, every kind of gun imaginable. There are shoot-outs in clubs and hand-to-hand combat. David Leitch, a former stunt performer who cocreated Wick and went on to direct action-heavy movies like Atomic Blonde and Deadpool, was at the forefront of the campaign to get the Academy to create an award for stunts. If Ballerina was coming out just a bit later, it’d be at the forefront of the pack.
Not that it’d be a shoo-in. It’s coming out mere weeks after Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, in which Tom Cruise once again hangs off of some flying object that he definitely shouldn’t be. But, if anything, the existence of two highly competitive films in the category would prove why it’s long overdue.
The quest to put stunt performers on the Oscar ballot has been a long one. As Leitch’s Wick cocreator Chad Stahelski told Variety in April “the [stunt] department has been around since the very inception of films” going back to the black-and-white days of Buster Keaton and has never been recognized. Veteran stunt performer Jack Gill has been calling for the Academy to recognize the profession since 1991, getting backing from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, but it never stuck.
“Every year I think, this is going to be the year,” Gill told The Los Angeles Times in 2015, but the Academy would ultimately not make the move. There aren’t enough stunt-filled movies released in a given year for a competitive field, some argued. Others doubted that stunts rose to the level of a movie-making art or science.
When the Academy finally announced the creation of the stunt design category, performers like Leitch celebrated the end of a long fight. Fall Guy stunt designer “Chris O’Hara and I have spent years working to bring this moment to life,” he said in a statement at the time, “standing on the shoulders of the stunt professionals who’ve fought tirelessly for recognition over the decades.”
For Chooljian the award also promises to highlight what stunt performers actually do. Often, it’s not just a matter of putting on a wig and flirting with danger so a more highly paid actor doesn’t have to. She notes that often she’ll get a script that just says “fight ensues” and it’s her job and that of her colleagues to design and plan that fight. People in the industry don’t want to talk about stunt doubles, she continues, “because they’re supposed to be hidden, and if they’re not hidden we’re not doing our job.”
But hidden perhaps shouldn’t mean unrecognized. For Ballerina, Chooljian and de Armas, who Choolijan says did quite a bit of her own stunts and “smashed it,” had to fight off multiple assailants, wield guns, and use ice skates as weapons. Like the other Wick films before, every move seems almost impossible but far more realistic than any action sequence in a superhero movie. Without those scenes, there is no story. It’s Oscar-worthy—even if it’s technically not.