How Demi Moore lost the Best Actress award after staging a near-perfect career comeback. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Rich Polk/Penske Media, Kevin Winter)
Mikey Madison is a good actress who gave a very good performance in a great movie that the Oscar voters were wild about. Anora’s near-sweep of its six Oscar nominations is ultimately a wonderful thing for indie filmmaking, especially with Sean Baker hitting the podium four times to cheer-lead for the continued existence of movie theaters. And yet here I sit, as crestfallen as I’ve ever felt at the end of an Oscars, because Demi Moore had that Best Actress Oscar within her grasp, only to see it snatched away.
Expectation games can be real bears. Back in May, when The Substance was just a gnarly-sounding body-horror movie at Cannes, the notion that Moore — a silver screen veteran who’d snagged a couple Golden Globe nominations in the ‘90s but had never made it close to the Oscar stage — could go on to become an Oscar nominee for a movie that lampooned Hollywood and its treatment of actresses of a certain age was a wild best-case scenario. But then the film was released in North America in the fall and became Mubi’s highest grossing film. By January, Coralie Fargeat’s film was proving popular with statue-giving organizations like the Golden Globe Foundation, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Critics Choice Association, too.
Moore’s win at the 2025 Globes seemed to cinch the narrative: A Best Actress Oscar had gradually gone from pipe dream to the most likely outcome. “Thirty years ago I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress,” she said in her acceptance speech. “That corroded me over time … I was at kind of a low point, when I had this magical, bold, courageous, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script come across my desk called The Substance. And the universe told me that ‘you’re not done.’”
Then the big Academy Awards day came and went, and the ingénue from an even more popular movie triumphed like the ingénues from more popular movies tend to do. It made Moore’s defeat feel pointed, if not cruel, despite the fact that Moore’s comeback arc was never guaranteed in the first place.
I’ve watched a lot of Demi Moore movies this year. The acclaim for The Substance at Cannes inspired me to pull the trigger on a long-gestating idea for a podcast chronicling her career, which I wanted to pursue both because I can’t resist a pun and because I’m addicted to ‘90s middlebrow cinema. Moore epitomized so much of what we all seem to miss about that era: a vast middle class of movies that weren’t great (though some were great!), weren’t terrible (okay, some were terrible), but they were watchable and they were packed with certified movie stars.
Moore was, above all else, a movie star, charismatically headlining box-office bonanzas like Ghost, going toe-to-toe on screen with the greats like Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, and taking on America’s deeply ambivalent attitudes about sex in movies like Indecent Proposal and Striptease, the latter of which made her the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Marching through Moore’s early films, it’s remarkable to see how often she was the magnetic bright spot in stories that didn’t give her much: sexist dreck like Blame It on Rio; Brat Pack fare both aggravating (St. Elmo’s Fire) and halfway interesting (About Last Night); potboiler noir like Mortal Thoughts. The closest she ever came to achieving Academy attention was for Ghost, a Best Picture nominee in 1990 that won Oscars for its screenplay and for Whoopi Goldberg’s scene-stealing supporting work. Moore simply got a Globe nod for what remains a deeply underrated performance built on a single perfect tear.
In short, the film industry — and by extension the film press — has not been particularly kind to Moore over the years. She was just as often denigrated in blind items from disgruntled producers, accusing her of acting demanding or entitled on sets, as she was lauded for her onscreen efforts. Forget that she herself was a producer who held movies like Mortal Thoughts together with both hands when the film had to find a new director. Or that she put up with the sexist ravings of Adrian Lyne and worked her body to the bone to play a Navy lieutenant for G.I. Jane — all in the same decade. Her talent was never quite respected. An infamous 1991 Vanity Fair cover story featured Moore, naked and pregnant, alongside a story that shaded her salad-ordering habits and included anonymous barbs from industry professionals who claimed “she was lucky and married well.”
I wonder how many current voting members of the Academy were working in the early ‘90s, and whether those individuals felt The Substance — in all its invigorating excess; a movie that was about the exact kind of terror that comes with being put out to pasture as an actress! — was enough to change minds. Reading animus into an Oscar loss is generally a pointless thought exercise. A person can lose an Academy Award by a few measly votes, hardly the margin between love and hate. But the thing is, audiences don’t view the Oscars as a collection of ballots. We see them as the culmination of season-long stories. And the story of Moore, an A-List but under-appreciated actress who’d quietly staged a perfect resurrection, was the kind of story we wanted the Oscars to cement.
In truth, this narrative was as much of a fairy tale as the bill of goods the titular Anora tells herself when she marries her feckless son-of-an-oligarch. Sean Baker’s movie was the crowd favorite since Cannes, and despite this season’s detours towards movies that were more formally ambitious or pushed the boundaries of good taste, Anora is where Oscar season ended up, and Best Actress was a natural extension of that film’s victory. Hollywood doesn’t want to wait to mint its next generation, and Madison is exciting and incredibly castable right now. So she won, and Moore, who waited 30-plus years to level up from popcorn actress to Academy contender, will have to wait a bit longer to see what she can do with the next role — assuming that arrives.
The real travesty won’t be that Moore lost this year’s Best Actress deathmatch. It will be if Hollywood can’t summon the imagination to give her the post-Substance career she deserves.
