James Cameron is a man who knows a lot about Sci-Fi movies and Oscars, and he’s recently been speaking quite candidly about both. The director is back with Avatar: Fire & Ash, coming just three years after Avatar: The Way of Water (a stark contrast to the 13 years it took for that movie to happen). Although the movie has mixed reviews, it looks like doing good business at the box office with a $345 million global opening weekend, plus an A CinemaScore that shows audiences are into it.
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As well as box office dominance, it’s also expected that the third Avatar movie will be a major contender during awards season, at least in the technical categories. Avatar and The Way of Water both picked up Best Picture nominations, with the former getting nine nominations total, the latter four, each winning in some below the line categories. Avatar isn’t the only recent Sci-Fi franchise that’s seen some technical dominance without getting the bigger prizes, as it has also happened with Dune and, in particular, Denis Villeneuve, something Cameron – whose Titanic won a record-equalling 11 Oscars – spoke to Variety about:
“I don’t think about the Academy Awards that much. Intentionally, I don’t think about that at this point. I don’t try to make a movie to appeal to their sensibility… they don’t tend to honor films like Avatar or films that are science fiction. Sci-fi is almost never properly recognized.
“Denis Villeneuve made these two magnificent Dune films and apparently these films make themselves because he wasn’t considered as a director, not even by the Director’s Guild. Like okay, you can play the awards game or you can play the game I like to play and that’s to make movies people actually go to. Sorry!”
Dune 3 Is The Last Chance For The Oscars To Put This Right (& What About Cameron’s Own Chances?)
Cameron is certainly right about Villeneuve, and Sci-Fi as a whole. Genre fare and franchise movies aren’t often recognized in the biggest categories at the Oscars, but Villeneuve was particularly deserving. His work on the Dune movies, especially Part Two, was nothing short of masterful, creating what is not only one of the best Sci-Fi movies of the 21st Century, but one of the most fully realized and astonishingly created cinematic worlds we’ve seen in that time too, alongside the likes of Avatar and The Lord of the Rings. Cameron himself was nominated for Best Director for Avatar, and Villeneuve should have been for one of the Dune movies (though it’s worth noting he was nominated for Arrival).
Villeneuve will be leaving Arrakis behind after Dune: Part Three, making that the last chance for the Academy to recognize him for his work on the franchise, but will it happen? There’s some precedent for this: The Lord of the Rings was largely overlooked at the Oscars until Return of the King which, partly as an attempt to course correct, won 11 awards, including Best Director for Peter Jackson. That was a bigger cultural affair that Dune, though, and the third movie’s source material – Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah – is where things start to get a whole lot weirder.
There’s also some strong competition already shaping up for the 2027 Oscars, including two-time Best Director winner Alejandro González Iñárritu with the Tom Cruise-starring Digger, Christopher Nolan with The Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s own Sci-Fi movie Disclosure Day, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, to name but a few very early contenders. It’d be unwise to expect Dune 3 to get close to a Return of the King style sweep, but Villeneuve should finally land that nomination at least.
As for Avatar: Fire & Ash‘s own Oscar chances, it’s likely it will again pick up several nods in the tech categories, but looks like being the first in the franchise to miss out on Best Picture. With critics only lukewarm on the movie, and the series having been nominated twice already, it’s an uphill battle to even get into that race. The same is true for Cameron with Best Director, not that he’ll mind too much based on his comments. Oscars, of course, are not necessarily an indicator of a movie’s quality or worth, and with both Fire & Ash and, next year, Dune 3 likely to be box office hits, that’ll probably matter more to their directors.
Avatar: Fire & Ash is now in theaters. Dune: Part Three releases on December 18th, 2026.
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