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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.
