HUSAVIK, Iceland – In the back room of an empty seaside hotel one Monday, a group of locals anxiously gathered around a computer to broadcast live the 93rd Academy Awards nominations, waiting to see if their campaign was successful.
The good news came shortly after 1 p.m. and residents heard the name of their town say again in an American accent: “Husavik”, a song from the Netflix movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga”. was nominated for the best original song.
The song takes its name from this tiny coastal town that is also home to the main characters in the film, and residents have been working for weeks to give the song an Oscar nomination.
“I’m sick of it,” when I heard the news, said Orlygur Orlygsson, 37, one of the activists gathered at the hotel. “The film gave Husavik worldwide recognition, and we wanted to do the same for the song.” Still, he was shocked by the nomination, he said.
Orlygsson is possibly the most famous fan of “Fire Saga” among the 2,300 people who live in this port city on the north coast of Iceland. He owns a cafe called Ja Ja Ding Dong, named after a silly song from the movie. And in February, when “Husavik” was one of the 15 titles on the academy’s longlist for best song, Orlygsson launched the campaign to convince members of the academy to nominate him.
“Fire Saga” tells the story of two musicians from Husavik, played by Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams. The couple – who are “probably not” brother and sister – are selected by default to represent Iceland in the Eurovision Song Contest after a ship exploded with more prominent Icelandic singers.
Let’s go into the world of “neon lights and billboards”, although in the end they find that there is no place like home. “Husavik” is their Eurovision act, the triumphant climax of the film.
When the film hit Netflix in June, critics weren’t impressed. Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for the New York Times: “This covered farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.”
But fans of the Eurovision Song Contest, which draws 200 million television viewers each year, embraced the film in a pandemic year when the actual competition was canceled for the first time since its inception in 1956. And once the residents of Husavik started their online campaign, thousands of these fans spread the word on social media.
The campaign shows a fictional Husavik resident named Oskar Oskarsson, who raves about the city in a video published on the campaign website, in which only “another Oskar” is missing.
In the ironic video, a woman pretends that a fish is an Oscar statue and residents leave gifts to elves to help with the campaign. “People in Husavik are very excited,” said the campaign website.
The video was viewed up to 200,000 times on YouTube and social media platforms, according to the organizers.
The actor in the video is Sigurdur Illugason, a local house painter who is now performing in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors” in the Husavik Theater Club for a masked audience of 50 people.
Kristjan Magnusson, the mayor of Husavik, said the main value of the campaign is to lift the spirits of the people in the city. “The fun of getting together for a big project is the most important thing,” he said. “The rest is a bonus.”
Molly Sanden, who sings for McAdams’ character on the track, praised the Husavik people for gathering behind the song. “The campaign shows that the city has the heart and the spirit that the song is about,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Sweden.
She said she hoped to visit Husavik once the pandemic is over to see the mountains, northern lights and seagulls described in the song lyrics.
The lyrics could apply to most of Iceland’s coastal communities, and the demo of the song was written with Husavik as a placeholder before the film’s director and producers visited Iceland to decide on a location for their film.
“I first heard a demo of the song when we were driving around Iceland looking for locations,” said Leifur Dagfinnsson, who runs the local production company True North that worked on Fire Saga.
The original plan, he said, was to find a town in the southern half of the island near the capital, Reykjavik, in order to save money on transportation. Husavik is closer to the Arctic Circle and has never been the setting for an international film production.
But the strong demonstration with Husavik was the decisive factor in favor of the northern city.
“Husavik is easier to pronounce than other Icelandic city names,” said Dagfinnsson. That gave him a clear textual advantage over Stykkisholmur (Stikk-is-hohlm-ur), a town he said “made sense from a budgetary point of view”.
Husavik has more whale watching boats than fishing vessels, and unlike the town in Fire Saga, there are half a dozen bars.
Tourism is the city’s main industry, and part of the reason a group of adults had time to campaign for the song is the widespread underemployment created by the pandemic. Residents hope that tourists will sing the city’s name in their car’s GPS as soon as Iceland allows vaccinated foreign visitors.
Leonardo Piccione, an Italian artist who lives in Husavik, noted that the tiny town had linked “two of the greatest television events in the world” and added, “I think you can work with that.”
The activists hope to build on the popularity of the Oscar nomination to open a Eurovision museum next to Café Ja Ja Ding Dong with memorabilia from Icelandic contestants who have never won the competition. And of course they will post more Oskar Oskarsson videos when the Academy members start voting next month.
It is widely predicted that “Speak Now” from “One Night in Miami” or Golden Globe winner “Io Si (Seen)” from “The Life Ahead” will win the best original song. Also nominated are “Fight for You” from “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “Hear My Voice” from “The Trial of the Chicago 7”, the third Netflix film in this category.
Win or lose, “Husavik” is now part of the urban fabric. The local soccer team, the Volsungs, play the pre-game soundtrack, and the children’s choir regularly plays the Icelandic portion of the song.
Fire Saga executive producer Savan Kotecha co-wrote the lyrics for the song using Google Translate for the Icelandic lines and Google Street View to get a feel for the city.
“It never occurred to me that the song would have a special meaning for the people there,” he said in an interview. “Now we really want to win for Husavik.”
