What This Year’s Oscars Showdown Between Tár and Elvis Tells Us About the State of Music Movies

How Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top biopic and Todd Field’s psychological thriller represent the yin and yang of modern Hollywood music films.
Austin Butler in Elvis and Cate Blanchett in Tar
Austin Butler in Elvis (photo courtesy of Warner Brothers) and Cate Blanchett in Tár (photo courtesy of Focus Features)

The Oscar nominations came out today, and among the 10 nominees for Best Picture are two movies about the tragic pursuit of musical glory and how it can unravel you as a person. Both focus on individuals with humble beginnings who concoct over-the-top personas, fall under the influence of powerful mentors, travel the world, wear impeccable suits, womanize, end up at the center of controversy, and bottom out in uncomfortable ways. Both feel like fever dreams, where the titular star is haunted by spirits and their own inner darkness. Both could easily be re-cut as horror films. Both are endlessly debatable. But only one of these films is good. 

Todd Field’s Tár is many things: a ghost story, a meme, a parable about cancel culture, a clear-eyed depiction of power, a hazy ending, possibly offensive to women conductors, possibly offensive to lesbians, possibly all in the character’s head. It’s easily one of the best films of the year. Cate Blanchett’s superstar conductor, Lydia Tár, leads orchestras with the pretentiousness, and perviness, of so many men before her, dangling opportunities in exchange for affairs. On the brink of her crowning achievement, a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Tár’s repugnant behavior either catches up with her, or she destroys herself, depending on how you read it. Blanchett has said her biggest inspiration in Tár’s manner, her public intellectualism, was the writer Susan Sontag, and the character is so vividly written that you may swear she’s real

As for Baz Luhrmann’s flashy take on Elvis Presley: Future generations may never hear Austin Butler’s real voice again, but it’s a worthy sacrifice. He laid himself down, not merely emulating one of the most imitated men of the 20th century but becoming him, and then carried the dead corpse of Elvis (the film, not the person) on his back. When I think of this movie forevermore, Butler will help me to forget about the worst role of his co-star Tom Hanks’ career. 

Take the scene where Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker finds out that Elvis is—gasp—white. He has just heard Presley’s cover of “That’s All Right,” and as the group crudely assesses the song’s “negro rhythms” and “country flavor,” Parker insists that a colored singer such as this wouldn’t play the local hayride. When country singer Jimmie Rodgers Snow gleefully informs him of Elvis’ race, Parker mutters through his inexplicable European accent, “He’s white???” followed by a dramatic pause and then, like a cash register going off in his brain, a more assured “He’s white”—a clip so ridiculous that it went viral last summer. Parker then leads a high-speed chase to become Elvis’ manager before anyone else. I have watched this scene many times, cackled over it, and urged friends to seek it out because I am shocked that it exists in such a garish form. However true to the realities of 1950s America, Luhrmann treats the revelation like a fun music history lesson to tap dance all over in his usual campy way. The whole thing is ill-conceived: America’s dad is not a Dutch villain, and Colonel Parker is not the star of the Elvis show. 

Elvis is the exact kind of film you’d expect to be nominated: a big-budget spectacle from a known auteur, with a soundtrack of well-loved hits and a beautiful young star under spotlight. Even though it (spoiler alert!) has a tragic ending, Luhrmann luxuriates in an old-school kind of glamor through Elvis; he clunkily glosses over things like appropriation, and it’s cringey. Tár, on the other hand, bites at almost every controversy of the day, from MeToo to girlbossing to the destruction of an artistic canon centered around white men, and yet never feels didactic. It gives you a lot to think about but no clear answers, not even an accepted reality of the film’s events. 

The inclusion of Elvis and Tár amid this year’s big nominees fits a recent pattern, as the Oscars have taken more of an interest in music movies since 2018. That was the year when Lady Gaga and A Star Is Born dominated the ceremonyGreen Book—a movie about jazz in the civil rights era, replete with more white saviorism—won Best Picture; and Bohemian Rhapsody brought Rami Malek an Oscar for his portrayal of Queen’s Freddie Mercury. In 2020, the bracing film Sound of Metal, about a drummer who suffers hearing loss, received a Best Picture nod, and last year CODA, about a singer who comes from a deaf family, won Best Picture. 

The takeaway seems to be: Academy members (and just the film industry at large) appreciate movies that use music as a backdrop for stories beyond music, while buzzworthy portrayals in biopics more often garner acting nods. This is good news for Tár and Austin Butler, though perhaps not enough to topple Everything Everywhere All at Once, a masterful genre mashup that leads this year’s noms with 11 and feels distinctly fresh. In a ceremony often torn between old and new, we shall see which one wins out this March.