Why Demi Left Without the Gold
It's Not Just Ageism
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Oscar voters awarding Demi Moore Best Actress for The Substance would have been the jolt the Academy and ceremony needed. Not only did Moore give 2025’s best celluloid performance, but she would have cut the Oscars’ prison bars horror films are kept behind.
As wonderful as Mikey Madison’s performance is in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning Anora, Moore’s bold and career-best harrowing turn in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror and feminist masterpiece has become an acting master class. It’s honest, daring, brutal, raw and vulnerable. For those of us who have followed Moore’s 47-year career, we have always known she is more than a “popcorn actress.”
When Moore clinched the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award over a week ago, I was hopeful she would add the Oscar statuette to her 2025 hardware. I looked forward to another profound speech from her.
She has infused her heartfelt orations with wisdom, humility and inspiration — all gained from decades of surviving disappointment, rape, abandonment and trauma. Her lows raised her rhetoric high, rounding her sentences as they do her acting.
That heft behind her words made them resonate with viewers and listeners. That heft can also be read in her memoir Inside Out.
Once The Substance won the Best Make-Up and Hairstyling Oscar, my confidence grew. It seem assured Moore would receive her flowers later that evening. Yet despite a growing and more diverse Academy membership, Oscar voters selected 25-year-old Madison for her role as a smart, resilient and independent sex worker instead of 62-year-old Moore for her a role of a mature, mistreated and insecure actress who destroys her body and mind in pursuit of eternal validation and youth.
In The Substance, Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is tossed out by the entertainment industry once she turns 50. Baker's Anora narrative does take viewers on a roller coaster, but Fargeat's The Substance stands out as a unique, savage and maniacal horror film among this year’s Best Picture nominees. She was also the only female nominated in the Best Director category. Her film slaughters audience expectations on top of ageist gender expectations. Moore anchors a film that is as beautiful as it is disturbing.
I am not the only person who feels the Academy did Moore wrong. The New York Times ran an article about the visceral disappointment felt by other Moore supporters. A Vulture headline reads “And the Oscar Goes to . . . Sue.” (A reference to the young doppelganger Elisabeth Sparkle births from her spine after injecting THE SUBSTANCE.)
Is the argument true that Madison’s win proved the thesis of Fargeat’s film? Perhaps. But I don’t think that is the sole reason.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences often dismisses horror films and the actors who perform in them. Years before Moore's nomination, Toni Colette also left the Oscar ceremony empty handed for her own Oscar-nominated performances in Hereditary and The Sixth Sense. Lily Rose Depp was not even nominated for her role as Ellen Hutter in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.
While the Screen Actors Guild Awards are voted on by acting members of SAG who understand and value the thespian art and craft, all Oscar members can vote in each category. And as every decade demonstrates, Oscar voters tend to champion well-loved and “safe” films. Remember how Forrest Gump overshadowed Pulp Fiction at the 1995 Oscars?
Revered as David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Alfred Hitchcock are as directors, they had and have never won an Oscar. Anthony Perkins did not receive an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Norman Bates. His sole industry acknowledgement for that role was typecasting for the rest of his life.
Horror usually goes unrecognized come awards season though there are exceptions. Kathy Bates won Best Actress for Misery, Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs, Ruth Gordon won Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary’s Baby, Jordan Peele won Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, and William Peter Blatty won Best Adapted Screenplay for The Exorcist based on his novel. But none of these movies was a body horror film.
Jeff Goldblum did not receive an an Oscar nomination for The Fly nor did Jeremy Irons for his performance as the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. Both films were directed by body horror master Cronenberg. Irons would not win an Oscar until 1991 for his performance as Claus von Bülow in the mediocre Reversal of Fortune.
How I hope that Moore will be offered another choice role like Irons was and win her deserving Oscar in a few years. From the striking and bold acting choices she has made throughout her career, I do think that remains possible.