Thursday Theoretical Oscar Category

Welcome to a weekly feature here at Movies With Abe. In my love for everything Oscar, it’s always fun to speculate on who or what might have been included given different circumstances. Though there are twenty-four fields recognized on Oscar night, that still neglects a handful of key players. As a result, I’d like to take a look each week at imagined categories, and who or what might have benefited from their existence.

The category: Best Stunt Coordination

Why it should exist: This would be a great way of recognizing action movies, which tend not to get nominated in many Oscar categories, and of rewarding those involved in the planning and execution of stunts. Sound, sound editing, and visual effects don’t quite capture the visual efforts involved with stunts. The Screen Actors Guild actually instituted a category for Stunt Ensemble starting in 2007.

Why it doesn’t exist: This category has actually been proposed three times, all in the last fifteen years, and rejected each time. While it would arguably present some of the best nominee clips during the Oscar show itself, it would also increase the number of awards given to people that most viewers don’t care about, which just wouldn’t make for great television.

Who might have been nominated the past five years:
2011: Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Salt, X-Men: First Class
2010: Green Zone, Inception, Iron Man 2, Tron: Legacy
2009: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2012
2008: The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, Quantum of Solace, Wanted
2007: 300, The Bourne Ultimatum, I Am Legend, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Red, Transformers

Who do you think might have been nominated?