Denis Villeneuve’s first part of Dune was nominated for 10 Oscars and it took home six of them. Based on the even greater success of Dune: Part Two, the sequel stands to have an even bigger night at the Academy Awards. While Josh Brolin is already campaigning for Villeneuve's Best Director Oscar, there is one Oscar that the sequel is highly unlikely to win.
The score for Dune: Part Two has been submitted for Oscar consideration even though it is technically ineligible for the award. The reason makes some amount of sense when you consider it, but composer Hans Zimmer thinks that the situation for Dune is unique, making it possibly worth the rules being revisited.
Why Dune: Part Two Isn’t Eligible For The Best Original Score Oscar
Dune: Part Two currently can’t take home the Oscar for Best Original Score, one of the awards it won at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony, because it won’t be eligible for the prize this time around. The issue is that most of the score for Dune: Part Two appeared in Part One and thus doesn’t qualify as “original.”
To be a Best Original Score the music for a movie must be written specifically for the film in question, while also being primarily made up of music that hasn’t appeared in other films. Since Hans Zimmer wrote the music for both Dune movies together as if they were truly a single film, the themes that were used in the first part, largely return in the second part. So the majority of the music has been heard before.
How Hans Zimmer Feels About Not Being Eligible For Dune: Part Two
While it’s at least understandable why the Oscar rule prevents music written for other movies from being considered for new films. Speaking with Variety, composer Hans Zimmer says that Dune, like other movies that were written as a single project rather than simple sequels, is a special case. Zimmer says it’s not even about winning the Oscar, as he doesn’t think he will win (if only because he won for Part One last time), but he does think it should qualify for consideration. Zimmer said…
I am potentially confronted with an odd problem, which I think is quite interesting because of the amount of music that comes from the first movie into the second. We are not a normal sequel. We’re not like Pirates of the Caribbean, you have a theme for Jack Sparrow that comes again. This is different. Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two are one story, so it would make no sense for me to go and change the theme for the characters. I knew what the last note of the second one was before I wrote the first note of the first one, and I had the whole arc in my head of how to develop what we were going to do.
There’s at least an argument to be made that Dune: Part Two score is as original as Part One since the music was written as if the two films were actually a single film. That said, it seems unlikely any exception will be made here. If the music is largely the same, then technically the score for Dune: Part Two already won an Oscar last time.
Perhaps, if Hans Zimmer handles the score for the planned Dune Messiah that one will be eligible again. The story will be different enough that it will likely require a lot of new music, even if some themes get reused.
