Why Dune deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar

polygon.com:

The 2022 Oscars ceremony is coming up on March 27, and 10 new movies are up for the Best Picture title: Belfast, CODA, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and any of them might end up winning big. In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’re making a case for why each of them might deserve to take the big prize.

Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Adapting the first half of Frank Herbert’s landmark novel, Villeneuve’s Dune is about the fall of the powerful House Atreides, an aristocratic family sent to the desert planet of Arrakis by a powerful empire to serve as proxy rulers. Dune follows the young Paul Atreides on his journey to a new land, where his family is betrayed and forced into exile. And the whole time, it’s suggested that Paul might be destined for something more, and that deep in the desert, he might find the power he needs to avenge his family and claim his heritage.

Denis Villeneuve is quickly becoming one of the foremost purveyors of prestigious genre cinema, pulling off wildly ambitious projects like a Blade Runner sequel with aplomb. Villeneuve’s films are craft-forward displays of awe-inspiring yet understated spectacle, the sort of movies that make people believe in big screens and bigger sound. It would be presumptuous to say that he’s trying to win awards with his science fiction projects, but not to say that his sci-fi films have a better shot at winning than most.

Ambition, mostly. Dune is a seminal work that has influenced countless sci-fi works over decades. It’s understandable that David Lynch’s 1984 film version couldn’t properly convey the book’s monumental stature: Herbert’s