My heart sank at Demi Moore’s shock loss in the best actress category at the Oscars last night.
For the past year, the star of “The Substance” has been instigating a meaningful conversation around women’s value and relevance as they age, and this felt a door being slammed on it.
The Oscar nomination, Moore’s first and the culmination of her long, often underappreciated career, felt like a validation for a 62-year-old grandmother, albeit an impossibly glamorous couture-clad one.
The winner, 25-year-old newcomer Mikey Madison, was incredible in “Anora.” She gave a gracious acceptance speech in which she praised her fellow nominees’ “thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, breathtaking work.” She seemed to look right at Moore, who was the favourite to win, in the front row as she did so.
Of course, Academy members vote on the quality of work in each category, even if the subject matter is apples and oranges. But we all have our favourites in the Oscar race: cinema has the power to transport us, and its actors speak to us on an emotional level.
Moore was nominated for her role as Elisabeth Sparkle in “The Substance,” a genre-bending body horror film by Coralie Fargeat, the only female director nominated this year. It delved elbow deep into a wildly underexplored topic: why women feel such crushing pressure to look youthful.
Moore’s character, an actress-turned-aerobics-instructor, consumes a black-market potion that unlocks a literal, physical younger version of herself, played by Margaret Qualley. The ensuing battle of the two Sparkles has heavy overtones of “Dorian Gray” and its lessons that pursuing beauty at all costs leads to one’s downfall, and that you cannot cheat fate.
Ironically, the film’s theme — the abject horror of being prematurely usurped by the younger generation — played out on the Academy’s stage. Moore herself was once a youthful supernova, a 1980s Brat Pack standout in St. Elmo’s Fire. She became unstoppable box office gold in the 1990s as the star of “Ghost,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Disclosure” and “G.I. Jane.” But she was never a critical darling, and this was her first awards’ season run ever.
She said as much in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes in January. “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress.’ And at that time, I made that to mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have,” she said. “That I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in, and I believed that.” She spoke about learning to recognize her worth, in the face of “those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough, we’re pretty enough, we’re skinny enough, we’re successful enough, or basically just not enough.”
Moore’s career reinvention and awards season dominance was inspiring for a huge demographic of women who often feel invisible and underestimated. The same goes for Michelle Yeoh, 62, who won the best actress Oscar two years ago for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and Pamela Anderson, 57, who was nominated for a Golden Globe this year for her dramatic comeback turn in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl.”
While promoting “The Substance,” Moore spoke to the larger conversation sparked by her role. “I felt like there was something that would be deeply resonant for others,” she told NPR, adding that what drew her to the role was, “What we do to ourselves…the idea of that violence in the way that we can compare and despair.”
She also addressed her own career resurgence. “What I feel from that is an excitement of possibilities,” she said on the Today show. “We are what the future is for women…I look at having my daughters, and I don’t want there to ever be in their minds that there is an end. To me, this is the most exciting time of my life.” And to W Magazine: “I would say I am a phoenix that has risen from the ashes multiple times in this one lifetime.”
Moore could have been referring to the personal difficulties she’s overcome.
She’s lived through very public relationships and breakups. Hers was the first “conscious uncoupling”: she and her superstar action hero husband Bruce Willis divorced in 1998, going on to maintain a caring family relationship with their three daughters and his second family, which continues as he now battles frontotemporal degeneration.
Moore also endured extreme scrutiny over her marriage and divorce from her second husband, Ashton Kutcher, who is 15 years her junior.
In her 2019 autobiography, “Inside Out,” Moore wrote about surviving child sexual trauma and her fight for her sobriety.
And she’s talked about her body image issues, telling the Guardian about the starvation and exercise regimens she put herself through to conform to the cinematic ideal of perfection.
In one of the most indelible images of Moore, she is naked and gloriously pregnant on what became a controversial cover of Vanity Fair in 1991. She’s said that she was putting herself out there as a way to explore her discomfort with her physical form. “I felt that my body wasn’t good enough and so…I was confronting my own insecurity,” she said on “The Drew Barrymore Show” last September.
That’s exactly what she does so successfully in “The Substance,” too, using her art form to foster discussion of this deep and painful aspect of being a woman.
Moore’s non-stop string of press and red carpet appearances were part of an all-out campaign that began at Cannes last May and culminated with the Oscars — the big one, the legacy-making one. Losing is always hard, but the spotlight was especially intense on her last night.
One imagines it must have been very difficult for Moore to go on to the after parties and see the consoling looks in the industry’s eyes. And yet, she soldiered on. She had to: Momentum is what keeps a career going, especially in Hollywood, a place long notorious for churning women up and spitting them out as they age out of being ingenues.
Win or lose, though, Moore now has the spotlight firmly in her grasp. Here’s hoping she uses it to keep up the good fight.
