Stunt performers spent decades asking the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a category of their own, and in April 2025 the answer finally arrived. The Academy announced the establishment of an annual competitive award for Achievement in Stunt Design, to be presented for the first time at the 100th Academy Awards in 2028, honoring films released in 2027. For a craft community that has campaigned since the earliest decades of the awards, the announcement ended one argument and started another: what stunt design means, and who will compete.
Why did stunts go unrecognized for so long?
The academy's historical position was that stunts, however skilled, constituted execution rather than design, an awarding-philosophy question about where craft categories begin and end. The counterargument, made repeatedly by stunt professionals and their supporters, was that action design is authorship: the choreography, physics and risk architecture of a sequence are creative decisions every bit as deliberate as cinematography or editing.
The push intensified publicly in 2024, when two of the industry's most bankable stars used their presenter slot on the Oscars telecast to argue the case for stunt performers, bringing the campaign to the largest audience it had ever had. Stars praising their doubles on stage had become a running theme of awards seasons, but the 2024 moment crystallized it into an explicit call for a category.
What exactly did the Academy announce?
Per the April 2025 announcement, the new annual competitive award recognizes Achievement in Stunt Design, beginning with the 100th Academy Awards ceremony in 2028, covering films released in 2027. The naming, stunt design rather than stunt coordination or best stunts, signals that the award is intended to honor design achievement, presumably the conception and execution architecture of a film's action, with specific rules to be finalized through the Academy's standards process.
The stunt category was announced alongside another structural addition, an award for casting, marking the first new competitive categories the Academy had added in a generation. Both announcements followed years of internal review and external pressure, and both land on the awards' hundredth edition, a symbolic stage the Academy chose deliberately.
Who has driven the campaign?
The stunt community itself, organized through its professional associations and its most decorated coordinators. The case rested on the evolution of the craft: modern action cinema is built on stunt design that integrates performance, safety engineering and camera language, and franchises increasingly sell themselves on practical action. A slate of the industry's biggest box-office earners, action franchises among them, made the omission harder to defend each year.
Supporters outside the craft mattered too. Directors who champion practical stunt work, actors who publicly credit their doubles and stunt teams, and trade coverage that kept the question alive through every awards cycle all contributed to the pressure that produced the 2025 decision.
What problems does the new category have to solve?
Every new award must define its unit of recognition. Is the award for a single sequence or a whole film's action design? Who receives the statuette, the coordinator, a design team, a defined number of honorees? How are contributions separated when multiple teams work on one production, which on large action films is standard? The Academy's rules process will answer these questions before the 2028 debut, and the answers will shape campaigning immediately.
Campaigning is a foreseeable complication. Studios will add stunt designers to awards-season marketing, and the community will watch closely whether the category honors the dangerous, invisible craft or becomes another marketing battleground. There is also the sequels problem: franchise action teams often span multiple films, and eligibility will need clean lines.
What does recognition mean for stunt professionals materially?
Potentially a lot. Craft categories change hiring economics; an Oscar-eligible credit gives stunt coordinators and designers leverage in negotiations, a place in billing conversations and visibility for the double whose face is never seen. The stunt profession has fought for decades not only for honorifics but for safety standards, insurance and residual structures, and recognition at the academy level historically raises all boats in a classification.
There is also a generational effect. A visible award creates a career target for young performers entering the field through gymnastics, martial arts, driving and military backgrounds, and gives stunt design a credential ladder it never had. The 100th Oscars in 2028 will hand a statuette to a stunt professional for the first time; the industry that has watched that community absorb the profession's risks without its recognition will finally see the correction performed on television.
What happens between now and 2028?
Three things. First, the Academy must publish the category's rules and voting procedures, defining eligibility and honoree counts. Second, films released in 2027 become the first eligible class, so productions shooting through 2026 and 2027 are already the first contenders, whether or not they planned to be. Third, the campaign culture begins: strategists will start positioning stunt designers, and the first stunt-design awards race in history will run through the 2027-2028 season.
The stunt community's veterans, some of whom spent entire careers arguing for this, will spend the next two years doing something unfamiliar: preparing acceptance speeches.
How does the stunt world prepare for its first campaign season?
Like every other craft community facing a new category, by building infrastructure. Stunt organizations and coordination teams have begun documenting their design processes, keeping records of concept work, rehearsals and safety planning that can later support awards submissions. Publicists who spent careers selling directors and actors are learning the stunt discipline's vocabulary, and studios with action-heavy slates will decide how seriously to campaign the category in its inaugural year.
The first race will set precedents that last decades. Which films are submitted, how the branch defines design authorship and whether the trophy goes to a single coordinator or a team will all be answered in practice, under maximum attention, at the academy's hundredth ceremony. The stunt community's leaders know it, which is why the mood since the announcement has mixed celebration with the careful planning of people who understand that being awarded once matters less than being awarded well.
For more context, read How an Actor's Awards Campaign Actually Runs From September to February.
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For more context, read character actor career.