Exploring Potential New Oscar Categories for 2025: Ryan Reynolds’ Push for Stunt Category Considered
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Oscars, announced about a month before the 2024 ceremony that it will introduce a brand new category of Best Achievement in Casting Award for the first time in almost 25 years. Months ahead of the Oscars 2025, actor Ryan Reynolds, who recently delivered a box-office hit Deadpool & Wolverine, has now raised his voice that it is long overdue to create a distinct category to honor stunt performers.
Taking to social media recently, he shared a number of photos with the Deadpool and Wolverine stunt performers and wrote, “Stunt work doesn’t have a category at The Oscars and I hope that’ll change someday. So many films SMASHED it this year… Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Chaplin were stunt performers as well as filmmakers. Telling stories with their entire bodies.”
Ever since Oscar began honoring cinematic excellence and the brilliant artists involved in it in 1929, the Academy has only added a new category almost every two or four decades including Best Animated Feature, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and recently combining Sound Mixing and Sound Editing into one category. While this may appear contradictory to casual Oscar viewers: the Academy has only 24 categories compared to Grammy, Emmy, or even Screen Actor Guild Awards which have more or less around 100 categories.
Thus, there’s no shortage of space for more Oscars. In fact, here are a few more areas the Academy may explore if they’re feeling generous and don’t want to wait another 20 years to make a change before introducing their 25th competitive category.
First of all, the Oscars need to create gender-neutral categories. The Academy Awards have long faced criticism for favoring historical epics and prestige dramas that catered mostly to white American audiences, but in recent years, the organization has made a concerted effort to become more inclusive. It’s time for the Academy to take this leap of faith as well. Along this line, the Oscars should also fit in a Best Breakthrough/Debut Performance for actors like Rachel Sennot’s performance as PJ in the 2023 teen comedy Bottoms and Greta Lee’s performance as Nora in Past Lives (2023).
Coming to new categories, while the casting director who works to put together an especially strong ensemble of performers will be awarded best casting, a Best Ensemble award would recognize the cast as a whole something similar to the Screen Actors Guild. The Best Film Ensemble Award was bagged by Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at the SAG 2024.
Movies with exceptionally large casts this year, such as Oppenheimer, Barbie, Asteroid City, Killers of the Flower Moon, and May December, would all be excellent selections here. These films present a unique chance to recognize expansive casts in which only a small number of actors will ever be able to fit into the four existing categories.
Next, considering the Oscars finally added the Best Animation Feature category, the voice actors behind bringing the character alive on the screen should also be recognized and honored.
Other categories that should be added to the Oscars and are yet to receive recognition are Best Cinematography, Best Original Song, Best Choreography, and further categorize the vast Best Picture category into Horror, Popular or Box-office hits, Independent, and International.
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