One year after Elvis landed 8 Oscar nominations (but no wins), your mind might be suspicious that this year’s Priscilla could also attract awards voters. Based on reaction from its Venice, you might be wrong. Sofia Coppola’s biopic casts Cailee Spaeny as The King’s young bride with Jacob Elordi as the legendary entertainer. The A24 release hits theaters on October 27th.
With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95%, Priscilla enters what it clearly already a crowded BP and Actress race. The film and Spaeny are certainly not guaranteed to make the cuts (especially the former). Elordi could contend, but Supporting Actor inclusion might be a reach. Based on a 1985 memoir cowritten by the title subject, Coppola’s adapted screenplay could also struggle in a bustling field. Unlike her Lost in Translation from 20 years ago, don’t count on her making the director or writing races.
I suspect A24 will need to mount expert campaigns for anything beyond Spaeney in Actress and she’s already competing with the likes of Emma Stone (Poor Things), Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), Fantasia Barrino (The Color Purple), Carey Mulligan (Maestro), Greta Lee (Past Lives), and Annette Bening (Nyad) to name a few. My Oscar Prediction posts will continue…
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This film deserves neither award nominations nor box office success because its historical underpinnings are so questionably inflammatory and prejudicial as putative biopic. The public adult persona of Priscilla as a real human being since the death of Elvis in 1977 has always relied on her financial promotion of the Elvis musical legacy and his image as a cultural icon despite her relatively short-lived marriage to him which ended in 1973 divorce.
According to biography.com, as a mother and adult Priscilla said in a 2016 interview, “I did not divorce him because I didn’t love him. He was the love of my life, but I had to find out about the world.”
Priscilla publicly in adulthood never said or so much as hinted (if my memory serves from living through the times) what is now being put forward in her film about being sexually mistreated by Elvis while she dated him as a minor (with the approval of her family of origin headed by a US Air Force officer stepfather). Her stepfather had moved his family including Priscilla into a W. German brothel at the time she met Elvis when he was deployed over there in the service. She would appear to have been no shrinking violet as a result of her family, not Elvis. (As a US service junior myself, experienced with US military involvement in officer family housing, I find it wholly incredible that the family didn’t know they were moving teen-aged Priscilla into a European brothel.)
There’s also as far as I recall no meaningful evidential corroboration of the negative things in Priscilla’s written memoir (on which the film is based) — and which now directly contradict her adult post-divorce economic usage of the Elvis legacy from which she has profited so handsomely for decades after he died and could no longer defend his reputation.
This film looks to me like a continuing money grab based on flimsy conjecture — or one young girl’s questionable memories tainted by a bizarre family-of-origin dynamic. There are many truthful stories of girls groomed and gaslit that could have been put to the screen without “Priscilla” as a film misusing the economics of iconic celebrity to twist the legacy of a perfectly imperfect American musical genius like Elvis who changed history with his music and can no longer defend his character.