In his 40-plus years as a stunt performer, coordinator, and second-unit director on such movies as Venom, Jumanji, and several entries in the Fast and Furious franchise, Jack Gill has dropped cars from a plane hovering at 10,000 feet (for 2017’s Furious 7) and sped through the streets of Puerto Rico in a muscle car dragging a 9,000-pound vault (2015’s Fast Five). He’s broken his back twice and his neck once. He’s accumulated 23 other broken bones, eight concussions, one punctured lung, and a finger that was sewn back on. Gill, in other words, is not easily rattled. But that changes when it comes to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which for almost three decades Gill has lobbied to add an Oscar category for stunt work.

“Dealing with the Academy has been more dangerous for me than any stunt I’ve done, because I have no idea which way this is going to go,” Gill says, standing inside a massive garage on his Agoura Hills, California, ranch that’s filled with career souvenirs such as the driving suit he used to double for Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. “When I’m designing an action sequence, I can break it into three pieces so each part is safe and we get the results we want. With the Academy, I can’t break it into any pieces. I just have no idea how to change their minds about what we do to get the result we want.”

What Gill and the rest of the film-stunt community want is pretty straightforward: recognition of their work by their industry on its biggest stage. The Television Academy honors TV stunt people at the Emmys. The Screen Actors Guild has a stunt-ensemble category at its awards ceremony that a SAG Awards spokesperson says was created specifically to recognize how stunt people not only ensure safety on set, but also “create the same characters as the actor-performers are bringing to life.” And yet, the Academy will have nothing to offer stunt people when it hands out Oscars in some two dozen categories during its ceremony on February 24. (The Academy declined to comment for this story.)

The Oscar ceremony has paid tribute to the stunt community a handful of times over the years. The Academy gave a 1966 honorary award to Yakima Canutt, a stuntman and second-unit director who doubled for the likes of John Wayne and designed the chariot-race sequence in Ben Hur. Hal Needham, who did stunt work in more than 90 films before becoming a director of films like Smokey and the Bandit, received a 2012 honorary award for his work.

Still, if ever there was a year to pay tribute to stunt people in the thick of their careers, this would be it. In an era when it’s far more convenient to stay home and watch films on Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu, the movies that get audiences into theaters tend to feature the sorts of spectacular stunts that beg to be seen on a big screen. Eight of the top 10 movies at the box office so far this year feature extensive, intricate action sequences, including Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, and Mission: Impossible—Fallout. That might explain why, earlier this summer, the Academy floated—and then quickly retracted—the idea of adding an award for what it called “outstanding achievement in popular film.”

“I understand giving an honorary Oscar for one exceptional career, but as a regular category, it doesn’t make sense,” says one Academy member who declined to be identified. “I look at Mission: Impossible, and it was chockablock with stunts and great visual and mechanical effects, but I wouldn’t know how to single it out and award it.”

In the early days of film, stunt performers were generally regarded as “the ones you brought in to fall off a horse or a wagon,” says Gill. “This started out as a roughneck type of thing. I’ve talked to the older guys, who told me when they got into the business they had no idea what was going to happen when they did a scene. [Producers] would say, ‘Raise your hand if you want to turn this car over.’ And if you were man or woman enough, you raised your hand. One guy said, ‘A lot of times I’d get into a car with an open top, turn it over, and try to leap free. Sometimes you made it. Sometimes you didn’t.’ ”

“They look at us like we’re a bunch of dumb cowboys.”

Things weren’t much better when Gill got his first stunt job, working on the 1976 Burt Reynolds movie Gator. He’d been a champion motocross racer up to that point, and took a friend’s suggestion to visit the set, where he met Needham, the film’s second-unit director. Needham, who at one point was the highest-paid stuntman in town, took a liking to Gill and brought him on board to do some motorcycle scenes. He also introduced his new protégé to what was at the time an important stunt person’s tradition.