Composer Hans Zimmer is not pleased that his score for Dune: Part Two may be ruled ineligible for the Academy Awards. Zimmer already won an Oscar for the first Dune movie in 2022, and in an interview with Varietyhe admitted that he didn’t expect to win the same Best Original Score award for the sequel. However, he took issue with the way his eligibility was determined.
Videos by ComicBook.com
“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,” Zimmer explained. “We are not a normal sequel. We’re not like Pirates of the Caribbeanyou 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.”
Still, Zimmer felt that there was a strong precedent for this kind of scoring in another lauded book adaptation. He said: “There was the story that I was ineligible. What you’re saying you shouldn’t be allowed to use this form of storytelling. The Lord of the Rings used this form of storytelling as well. They had one book and one story which they needed because of its sheer size and weightiness, they needed to divide into three parts.”
[RELATED: How Dune Prophecy Fits into the Dune Movies Timeline Explained]
The Lord of the Rings was published as a trilogy, but author J.R.R. Tolkien generally considered it to be one big novel. Meanwhile, Frank Herbert’s Dune was originally serialized for publication in the magazine Analog before it was collected into a single novel. Even then, the 412-page story was divided into three parts – “Book One: Dune,” “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet.” The modern screen adaptation by Denis Villeneuve splits the whole story down the middle, but as far as most fans are concerned, it’s one big adaptation of a single book split across two films.
Why Eligibility Matters
Cutting to the chase, Zimmer said: “Here’s the thing, I’m not going to win an Oscar for the second one if I won an Oscar for the first one, which I did, right? That’s not the point. My point is be careful about these rules because what you’re doing is in the back of the studio’s mind, the Oscars are important, and you’re influencing the way you are saying whether we can create art or not. You’re saying you can’t do that because we won’t allow art to be nominated. We should have the freedom to find ways to create whatever comes to us.”
“Denis made the right choice by splitting a heavy-duty book into two parts,” Zimmer added.
It’s worth noting that Warner Bros. has submitted Dune: Part Two for the Oscars’ Best Original Score category, and so far its eligibility hasn’t officially been decided. Many industry insiders expect it to be denied, but at the time of this writing we don’t know how the Academy will respond. Dune and Dune: Part Two are both streaming now on Max.
