Predicting The Major 2022 Oscar Winners

While there may be more powerful or well written scripts up for the award, for the sheer difficulty of what Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth achieved, their work on Dune deserves to take home the prize. Frank Herbert’s novel isn’t just a hard one to adapt, it’s a book that has often seemed impossible to properly capture, and without compromise, these three have managed to do it justice.

Dune isn’t a film for everyone, but director Villeneuve managed to get the balance perfectly right. As he’s done on Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival before it, he has taken a blockbuster format and made it smart and challenging, while ensuring it still has mass appeal and an aesthetic approach geared towards the biggest of screens.

It’s that intelligent compromise that makes this script so commendable. While David Lynch found himself locked in a battle with the studios that resulted in his interesting but flawed 1984 version, Villeneuve, Spaihts, and Roth delivered exactly what was asked of them, a faithful but accessible imagining of a beloved sci fi property. They also smartly took on only half of the book, meaning they’ll be back for more in a couple of years.