Boosting those prospects, last year the academy moved stunt coordinators, who had previously been categorized as members at large, into a newly created Production and Technology branch that also houses assorted technical and production positions including chief technology officers, script supervisors, choreographers and music supervisors.

"Now we have a seat at the table and some say-so in how this proceeds forward, which is a big step," says Gill. "If we can be a little more informative with the public and the academy board members about what exactly stunt coordinators do and keep the ball going, I'm hoping in the next one or two years we can see a category. I think that they need it and I think that they want it. We've just got to keep pushing." (AMPAS declined to comment for this story.)

With "The Fall Guy," Leitch is hoping to remind audiences and the academy alike just how critical stunts are to the success of so many films. The movie serves as a tribute to old-school stunt disciplines — fighting, falling, being set on fire — and features a number of showstopping action set pieces, including a 225-foot car jump, an 80-foot boat jump and a record-setting "cannon roll" in which a cannon-like mechanism mounted under a vehicle shoots toward the ground while it is traveling at generally inadvisable speed, making it flip. This last stunt, executed by stunt driver Logan Holladay, saw a Jeep Cherokee completing eight and a half revolutions, surpassing the previous record of seven set on 2006's "Casino Royale."

"The cannon roll was special," says Leitch. "When I put it in the script, potentially setting a world record, it was like, 'Hey, if we're going to make a movie about a stuntman and an homage to the stunt community, we should try and do something big that's never been done.'"

In an era in which action scenes are routinely cleaned up and augmented with CGI, face replacement and a growing array of AI tricks, Leitch was determined to rely as much as possible on practical "in-camera" stuntwork with all its potential risks to life and limb. "We're doing our best in this film to show that it really hurts," he says.

"When it's real, it feels different," says Holladay, whose father worked as a stuntman on the "Fall Guy" TV series in the 1980s. "When you're watching something that's been computer-generated, it's like watching a video game — there's no risk by any person in there. We did everything for real, and that's what keeps you on the edge of your seat."

While the film pokes fun at stars like the film's Tom Ryder, who boast of doing all their own stunts, Gosling, who played a stunt driver in the 2011 film "Drive," did a few key ones in "The Fall Guy" on his own, including falling backward 15 stories on wires for the opening sequence.

"Ryan is scared of heights but he was like, 'It's called "The Fall Guy' — I've got to do it,'" says McCormick. Gosling did draw the line at some hazards: "He told me his wife [Eva Mendes] wouldn't let him let us set him on fire," says O'Hara.

For years, even as the stunt community delivered ever more eye-popping spectacle, the campaign for a dedicated Oscar category struggled to gain traction with the academy's leadership, a situation made more difficult given the historically small number of stunt coordinators within the organization itself. Despite persistent lobbying by Gill and high-profile supporters in the industry, the proposal to add a new stunt category was voted down multiple times by the academy's board of governors.

Over the past decade, however, as Gill has pushed AMPAS to boost member recruitment from the stunt world, the number of stunt coordinators in the academy's ranks has tripled from just 31 nine years ago to more than 100 today, out of a total of more than 10,800 members. (The casting directors branch, one of the smallest in the organization, has nearly 160 members.)

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