Dune: Part 2, Oscars and Art; how Academies dictates arts.

A fairly hot topic of the last month has been the decision by the Oscar Academy to rule out Dune: Part 2 by Hans Zimmer from the competition for the best Soundtrack.
As stated in the exclusive Variety article “Hans Zimmer’s ‘Dune 2’ Score Fails to Meet Eligibility Requirements for Oscars”, the Academy states that “In cases such as sequels and franchises from any media, the score must not use more than 20% of pre-existing themes and music borrowed from previous scores in the franchise.”

Dune: Part 2 wasn’t the only movie ruled out, other masterpieces such as Arrival and Black Swan saw themselves inelegible by the Academy’s Music Branch.
John Williams’ Star Wars and Indiana Jones weren’t, though.

A particular quote by Zimmer struck me: “[...] 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.”

What the german Composer is advocating, is for me one of the most fundamental truths of Art:

Art is dictated by effectiveness, not by rules.

By that, I don’t obviously mean there are no guidelines for a good work. As a matter of fact, I believe there are, and are physics and psychology-based (partials, acoustics, Gestalt behaviours in the subconscious, and so on).
What I mean, is that a good work doesn’t come with a premade recipe that tells you “if you use more than 20% of your previous related work then it’s not good enough”.

There’s this unending research of the new, this “new is always best” mentality, that permeates the academic panorama and castrates wonderful works.

As I sometimes scroll my Instagram Reels feed, I find posts making fun of the academic tendency to discard Tonal Practices and Modality to fuel “atonal” aesthetics just because “it’s outdated”. In the search of always new harmonic solutions, we quickly discover that totally dissonant works sounds the same.
It’s not recent news, John Cage quickly discovered in the 60s that hyper-deterministic solutions in music sounds indistinguishable from hyper-casual solutions.

In music, the main method of creating engagement with the listener is achieved by repetition of motivic elements:
bear with me, with motivic elements I do not necessarily mean grandiose themes, even small idiomatic fragments can be motifs.
What you need to do is create footholds on which the mind can rest and orientate, otherwise you risk not giving enough information on which the listener can orient his listening.
With that in mind, too much repetition is as disorienting as the previous case: music becomes background noise, and the listener’s mind wanders.

In a piece longer than three minutes, in a complex work, there’s a physiological need for recognizability of materials, for an economy of means of sorts, especially inside the music score for a movie franchise thought as a whole mega-movie.

It comes as a logical solution by Zimmer to maintain a cohesive musical structure in terms of themes, timbres, harmonic solutions and general music direction.
Dune is the downfall of the heroic Paul Atreides, who evolves into an anti-hero. It’s a cohesive story, which calls for a cohesive music.

The composer correctly references in the interview composer Howard Shore, who managed the triptych “The Lord of the Rings” in the same manner.

Perhaps the Oscar Academy doesn’t actually know anything about arts, and is too focused on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to actually evaluate artistic efforts on an objective and unbiased basis.