The 2025 Academy Award nominations are out, and they are whelming. The musical drama Emilia Pérez received the most nominations with 13, followed by Wicked and The Brutalist with 10 apiece, and then A Complete Unknown and Conclave with eight apiece.
Meanwhile, Dune: Part Two got only five nominations, down from the 10 that Dune: Part One received after it came out in 2021. This is despite the fact that Dune: Part Two was better reviewed than Part One and made more money at the box office than Part One. If you saw the movie, you know that Part Two finished adapting Frank Herbert's seminal 1965 sci-fi novel Dune, so it was no wonder that the second movie improved on the first; director Denis Villeneuve got to work with the juiciest parts of the book.
So why did Part Two receive fewer Oscar nominations? And why did Villeneuve not get a nomination for either of the films? That snub rankles actor Josh Brolin, who played House Atreides swordmaster Gurney Halleck in both movies. Late last year, he jokingly threatened to "quit acting" if Villeneuve didn't get an Oscar nomination for Dune: Part Two. Now that this horror has come to pass, he weighed in on his Instagram Stories:
"Just want to say congratulations on the ‘Dune’ best picture nomination, to Greig Fraser on cinematography, for best visual effects, for Patrice [Vermett] on production design and for sound. Apparently, I am going to quit acting because Denis Villeneuve didn’t get nominated. This is just how this thing works. It makes no sense to me. That’s okay. [Editor] Joe Walker and Denis, you deserve it. It’s an amazing film. It was even better than the first one. The people who have gotten accolades surely deserve it. Happy to be a part of it. Congrats everyone."
Other major players in the industry have sounded off on the snub, like Christopher Miller, who produced the excellent, ongoing series of animated Spider-Verse movies. “There were many films that had great directing this year but what Denis did — in all aspects of the craft — was masterful," Miller wrote on Twitter/X.
Why don't the Oscars reward good, popular movies?
It does indeed seem counter-intuitive that Denis Villeneuve didn't get a nod for Dune: Part Two, a beautiful, powerful movie that owes much of its success to its direction. If you're wondering, the nominees this year are Jacques Audiard for Emilia Pérez, Sean Baker for Anora, Brady Corbet forThe Brutalist, Coralie Fargeat forThe Substance, and James Mangold for A Complete Unknown.
I haven't seen all of those movies, but I'm confident Villeneuve could take one of those slots. And you'd figure Hollywood would want that; if you have a huge hit film that's also good enough to deserve high honors, why wouldn't you want to give them a shout out and show audiences that the films they love are getting recognized? But the Oscars have a long history of ignoring broadly popular movies, especially if they're in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Voting can often be more a matter of campaigning than anything else; back in the day, future convicted sex criminal Harvey Weinstein was notorious for mounting elaborate campaigns to secure Oscar nominations for films he produced. That kind of wheeling and dealing often results in awards that make the general public scratch their heads, which isn't good if the end goal is to get more people invested in the movies.
I don't know what sorts of campaigning is being done this year around the Oscars, but the narratives are swirling furiously. Emilia Pérez — which I haven't seen, in the interest of full disclosure — has become the "villain" of Oscar season, with lots of people dinging it for being ham-fisted, cringey, tone-deaf, and just plain bad. Because the main character is a trans woman, some of the backlash has come from bigots, but there's also been a ton from members of the LGBT+ community, many of whom see the movie as a shallow, under-researched attempt to trade on a hot topic. It feels like Emilia Pérez could become the next Crash or Green Book: movies that won big at the Oscars because voting for them let Academy members feel they were being progressive on important social issues, even though the movies themselves sucked and engaged with those issues in shallow, reductive ways.
So in short, if you're wondering why the Dune movies weren't pelted with awards, it's because success and quality are just two of the many factors that go into it, even if it shouldn't be that way. At least Josh Brolin has been grousing about this since Villeneuve was snubbed for a directing Oscar after Dune: Part One came out. “I don’t know how you get 10 nominations and then the guy who has done the impossible with that book doesn’t get nominated,” he said at the time. “It makes you realize that it’s all amazing and then it’s all fucking totally dumb. So congratulations for the amazing accomplishments that these incredibly talented people have been acknowledged for, because it’s all really, really dumb.”
The 97th Academy Awards will air on ABC (and stream in Hulu) on March 2.
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