Oscars Countdown: What to Read (and Watch) After Elvis

Sure, we’re a website about books, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get in on the Oscars fun, too. (Exhibit A: If they gave Oscars to books, our 2022 nominees.) And while there are few adaptations in this year’s lineup, we’ll still be tuning in on Sunday to celebrate storytelling, judge the Academy’s taste, and perhaps witness some live drama. In the meantime, we’re recommending the books and films you and should read and watch next for each Best Picture contender. And the nominee is: Elvis. 

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READ THIS, WATCH THAT:

Catherine Lacey, The Answers

Almost without exception, I find biopics very boring. The foibles of celebrities as they play out in real time, on the other hand? Endlessly fascinating. So if you were more interested in the narrative around Austin Butler’s Elvis accent than Elvis’s actual life, I recommend Catherine Lacey’s excellent, bizarre novel, which features an eccentric movie star seeking to build and maintain the perfect relationship with the help of numerous women acting as different genres of Girlfriend (Maternal Girlfriend, Anger Girlfriend, Mundanity Girlfriend…). Austin Butler, eat your heart out.  –Jessie Gaynor, senior editor

Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn

Austin Butler’s uncanny impersonation and Baz Lurhmann’s reliably extravagant stylings notwithstanding, Elvis is a… pretty bad film, not least because it elides or ignores most of the stuff that made Presley creepy or narc-y. Elvis was a weird guy, and I for one want more weird Elvis movies and weird Elvis books. It doesn’t get much weirder than Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson’s 2017 musical alternate history novel set in a fallen US, in which the Twin Towers reappear intact in the Dakota badlands 20 years after their destruction, inhabited only by Elvis Presley’s stillborn twin brother Jesse, now an adult wrestling with survivor’s guilt.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor in chief

Prince Harry, Spare

Turns out Prince Harry and Baz Luhrmann have a lot in common: when they make something, they go big, they go outrageous, and there are so many colors and lights and shiny objects flying around that you really can’t tell if what you’re looking at is actually any good. But hell, either way you’re having fun, so who cares?  –Emily Temple, managing editor

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

The fact that Bohemian Rhapsody (terrible) made $910 million and won four Oscars, while Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (amazing) made a paltry $20 million and won zero Oscars proves that there’s not an ounce of justice in this world. Walk Hard (tagline: Life made him tough. Love made him strong. Music made him hard.) is basically a 96-minute piss take of Walk the Line and Ray that channels the gag-a-second energy of Airplane! or The Naked Gun. It is an utter delight from start to finish. In the time it would take to watch Elvis, you could (and should) watch Walk Hard twice. Alternatively, you could just watch it once and then spend the next hour and a half watching clips like this and this.  –DS

Literally just ride a wooden rollercoaster

If you’ve ever found yourself at a discount theme park with some time to kill, you’ve probably decided to take a spin on the park’s decrepit but still-somehow-functional wooden roller coaster. The coaster’s theme is invariably kitsch—probably it’s called THE THUNDERCLOWN or ZIPPY-KAY-YAY—and you’re not expecting to enjoy the ride so much as to have a novel experience. Viewers should go into the Baz Luhrmann film Elvis with the same expectations: it’s going to be a rattling, jarring, uncertain ride. You’re never certain if anything that’s happening is actually meant to be happening or is some kind of malfunction. You will probably have a headache at the end of it—but you will have had a particular brand of bombastic, unstable fun that, like a wooden roller coaster, is increasingly difficult to come by.  –Calvin Kasulke, assistant publisher