Zendaya, Dune: Üçüncü Bölüm'deki Chani rolüyle En İyi Kadın Oyuncu ödülüne aday gösterildi.

Zendaya will campaign for Best Actress at the 99th Academy Awards for her role as Chani in Dune: Part Three, the Denis Villeneuve finale Warner Bros. opens on December 18.

She ran in supporting actress for the first two films. Moving to lead for the third follows how much bigger Chani’s part has become. Variety reported the decision, citing multiple sources, and both Warner Bros. and Zendaya’s representatives declined to comment.

Part Three opens nearly two decades after Paul Atreides took the Imperium. Timothée Chalamet plays him as an emperor facing the bill for his own reign, haunted by visions of collapse, with Chani back as the long lost love at the center of a conspiracy closing around him. Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert Pattinson, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Charlotte Rampling and Isaach de Bankolé fill out the cast.

Frank Herbert wrote Chani as a quiet supporter who is fed contraceptives by Irulan and dies giving birth to twins. Villeneuve’s Chani never bought the messiah story, read Paul’s coronation as a betrayal and rode back into the desert at the end of Part Two. I judge a story by how much weight a character’s choice actually carries, and that exit is the heaviest decision either film has handed anyone. Villeneuve has also cast teenagers, Nakoa-Wolf Momoa and Ida Brooke, as Paul and Chani’s children Leto II and Ghanima, who are newborns at the close of Dune Messiah.

Chalamet set up the break between them at the fan event where the second trailer screened.

“Chani is obviously feeling a sense of betrayal toward Paul.”

— Timothée Chalamet

The campaign closes a year in which Zendaya appeared in the two highest grossing releases of 2026, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She goes in lead for Kristoffer Borgli’s dark comedy The Drama and in supporting for The Odyssey, where Anne Hathaway, Samantha Morton and Charlize Theron share the category. She also joined the cast of Shrek 5 as Shrek and Fiona’s teenage daughter, a film Universal has since moved out of December 2026 and into June 2027, which leaves the holiday slot to Dune.

Neither earlier Dune film produced an acting nomination at the Oscars or the Golden Globes, although both were recognized in technical categories. GoldDerby’s prognosticators still leave Zendaya out of both Oscar actress races and rank her Odyssey co-stars ahead of her in supporting. They do have her in contention for a Golden Globe for The Drama, another for the final season of Euphoria, and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for the same show. I think the lead campaign is worth running whether or not the nomination lands, because the case for it rests entirely on Chani driving the plot, and saying that months before release is a promise the film has to keep.

An Oscar nomination would be the first of her career. She has two Emmys for Rue in Euphoria, which made her the youngest two time winner in the lead drama actress category, a Golden Globe in 2023 for that role, and two Golden Globe nominations in 2025 for Challengers, one of them as a producer. The Academy rewrote parts of its rulebook before this cycle as well, updating its position on AI and allowing an actor to collect multiple nominations in a single category.

Villeneuve is not the only one reshaping Dune around what the audience actually responds to. Funcom rebuilt Dune: Awakening and its PvP mode after more than 80 percent of lifetime players turned out to have never touched player versus player content, and Patch 1.3.20.0 splits the Deep Desert into separate PvE and PvP instances. I run PvE almost exclusively in survival games, so pulling the arena out of the mandatory path strikes me as the right read of who actually lives on Arrakis.

Hagga Basin loses PvP entirely in the same patch. Before that, griefers had been parking ornithopters on top of other players’ craft there, dropping a thumper and feeding players to worms that arrived while the target was still pinned.

Warner Bros. releases Dune: Part Three in theaters and Imax on December 18. The 99th Academy Awards air on ABC and Hulu on March 14, 2027, with Conan O’Brien hosting for a third straight year.