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As well as box office dominance, it’s also expected that the third Avatar movie will be a major contender during awards season, at least in the technical categories. Avatar and The Way of Water both picked up Best Picture nominations, with the former getting nine nominations total, the latter four, each winning in some below the line categories. Avatar isn’t the only recent Sci-Fi franchise that’s seen some technical dominance without getting the bigger prizes, as it has also happened with Dune and, in particular, Denis Villeneuve, something Cameron – whose Titanic won a record-equalling 11 Oscars – spoke to Variety about:
“I don’t think about the Academy Awards that much. Intentionally, I don’t think about that at this point. I don’t try to make a movie to appeal to their sensibility… they don’t tend to honor films like Avatar or films that are science fiction. Sci-fi is almost never properly recognized.
“Denis Villeneuve made these two magnificent Dune films and apparently these films make themselves because he wasn’t considered as a director, not even by the Director’s Guild. Like okay, you can play the awards game or you can play the game I like to play and that’s to make movies people actually go to. Sorry!”
Dune 3 Is The Last Chance For The Oscars To Put This Right (& What About Cameron’s Own Chances?)
Cameron is certainly right about Villeneuve, and Sci-Fi as a whole. Genre fare and franchise movies aren’t often recognized in the biggest categories at the Oscars, but Villeneuve was particularly deserving. His work on the Dune movies, especially Part Two, was nothing short of masterful, creating what is not only one of the best Sci-Fi movies of the 21st Century, but one of the most fully realized and astonishingly created cinematic worlds we’ve seen in that time too, alongside the likes of Avatar and The Lord of the Rings. Cameron himself was nominated for Best Director for Avatar, and Villeneuve should have been for one of the Dune movies (though it’s worth noting he was nominated for Arrival).
Villeneuve will be leaving Arrakis behind after Dune: Part Three, making that the last chance for the Academy to recognize him for his work on the franchise, but will it happen? There’s some precedent for this: The Lord of the Rings was largely overlooked at the Oscars until Return of the King which, partly as an attempt to course correct, won 11 awards, including Best Director for Peter Jackson. That was a bigger cultural affair that Dune, though, and the third movie’s source material – Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah – is where things start to get a whole lot weirder.
