Elvis & The Oscar

by Esben Krogsgaard
March 15, 2023

All Elvis fans were waiting in suspense. Would Baz Luhrmann´s Elvis win an Oscar? Perhaps for best male actor, best costume or best makeup? But it didn’t turn out that way. Despite eight nominees, it got nothing.

This essay is not about the disappointment of the outcome. Neither am I searching for hidden agendas within the Oscar jury. I must confess, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a great movie, and it deserves all the credit. But I am still asking: Did Elvis play a part during the Oscar show besides being “just” a nominee? A rhetorical question, of course!

Elvis has existed throughout my entire life. My father was a big Elvis fan. I remember him playing Elvis singles and LP’s during my childhood. “How Great Thou Art” and “Aloha from Hawaii” were among these records. Later when I started copying CD’s, illegally of course, my father wanted me to make a copy of the compilation album Elvis. I made fun of my father, because I thought the music was old fashioned and bad, and I could only, with some strain, accept the remix of “A Little Less Conversation.”

Three years ago, the Danish National Television showed the 1968 Comeback Special and Aloha from Hawaii. The next day I rushed to the local record store, Moby Disc in Odense, and I was recommended From Elvis in Memphis. I listened to this album during the following months, and I haven´t stopped ever since.

Elvis is the best artist, singer and entertainer ever. This opinion is of course made through my Elvis fan glasses, but you cannot reject the impact he had on an entire youth generation and music development in general. And you cannot forget how easily and beautifully he sang all kinds of music: blues, country, rock, gospel, ballads, soul and funk. He is a true artist, a prism that gathers all feelings and experiences.

Elvis fans remember the Aloha show. We know how Elvis enters the stage, how he sings “See See Rider,” “My Way,” “An American Trilogy,” “I´m So Lonesome I could Cry,” “Steam Roller Blues” and so on. We know how he channels all feelings from joy to grief, sex and rage, belief and suspicion, guilt and forgiveness. We experience, how he carries all life´s facets in his voice, and you are tempted to look at him as a Superman. He was an entertainer out of this world, no doubt about it. The best show in the circus according to “The Colonel.”

Finally, let us return to the Oscar show having trotted a little byway. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is about a tragical relation between a mother and her daughter Joy. Joy misses the love of her mother, and she gets the impression, that everything in life has the same value, pure nihilism. Joy turns into a frightening version of this nihilistic point of view: the girl Jobu (a reference to the Biblical Job).  Jobu is supernatural, she has all kinds of personalities and different powers. She wears all kinds of clothing’s and embodies all choices in the world. In the beginning she is portraited as an evil force, which will splinter the world.  But it is revealed, that as an antagonist she is misunderstood, because through the pain of indifference she wants to show her mother, that something does matter: Love! As a character, Jobu is the key to salvation. She synthesizes a splintered world.

The director had to choose, how this girl Jobu is introduced. Which costume does she wear? And during this sequence of the movie, “I lost my nose and mouth,: as we say in Denmark. Jobu was wearing Elvis’s Aloha From Hawaii jumpsuit: The American eagle, the choice of the founding fathers. And just as I made fun of my father, Joby´s mother exclaims, “Why do you look so stupid?”

Five minutes later a fragment of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is played: the exact same melody to which Elvis enters the stage. This melody makes associations to Space Odyssey 2001 and a piece of music by Strauss, but not the least to Nietzsche’s book of the same name. This book is actually about the “übermensch,” the death of god, will to power, and nihilism.

We must assume that the director asked himself how do I portray the daughter Joy, a human being, who carries so much pain on her shoulders, a human being which contains all facets and all choices of life, for good or evil?

The choice was, conscious or unconscious, Elvis or more correctly, Elvis as an archetypal symbol wearing the American eagle jumpsuit, standing on the stage in Hawaii while channeling the foundation of life: love and all its entanglements.

And finally, we arrive to the question: did Elvis play a part during the Oscar show besides being “just” a nominee? Yes, he did! Still the legacy of Elvis live s among us, even though he hasn´t been here for 46 years.

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🌟🌟𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐑🌟🌟

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