It’s Ridiculous That This Performance Is Supposed to Win an Oscar – Slate

“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’ ” Demi Moore said in her Jan. 5 speech accepting a Best Actress Golden Globe for playing over-the-hill aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle in Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror epic The Substance. “I made that mean that this wasn’t something I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged.”Rarely has an actress gotten so much mileage out of an early acceptance speech. Even though it’s been weeks since she won that Globe; even though The Substance is quite the tough hang, reportedly putting off some academy voters; even though Anora has gathered new momentum for Best Picture and its star Mikey Madison won a surprise Best Actress BAFTA last weekend—despite all of this, Demi Moore is still considered a pretty sure thing to triumph on Oscar night. As of late this week, the betting website Polymarket had Moore with a higher chance of winning than all the other nominees in the category combined, and the lion’s share of the prognosticators on Gold Derby have picked Moore to take home the trophy. All winter, everyone from Vulture to the New York Times has pronounced her to be the front-runner, with both outlets citing “her masterful Globes acceptance speech, an A-plus bit of awards campaigning” that cemented the fact that she has the best “narrative” of any Best Actress contender.There’s just one problem with this: Demi Moore should not win a Best Actress Oscar for The Substance! After first seeing this movie in the theater, I was so overwhelmed by the volume of latex, fake blood, and barfed-up boobs, and so confused trying to puzzle through the story’s internal logic and parse its over-the-top third act, that I didn’t really register Moore’s performance at all. Watching the movie again, better prepared for Fargeat’s bombast, I realized that Slate’s Dana Stevens was (as per usual) correct in her early pan: The Substance is a mess, full of sound and fury, signifying little, with Moore given scant else to do besides “react with horror to her latest mutation.” Indeed, Moore is, well, just fine in it. If you were to strip away all the prosthetics—and all the extratextual weight we bring to seeing this real-life sex symbol grapple with the fact of her own aging—I don’t believe there would be all that much left underneath.Yes, Moore has one moving scene, which happens to make for a perfect Oscar clip: She misses out on a date with an old high school classmate because she can’t bring herself to believe she looks good enough to leave the house, and gazes into the mirror, rubbing her makeup off again and again, with escalating rage and frustration. But she mostly does a lot of gasping, gurgling, and griping from inside piles of the movie’s prodigious (and genuinely Oscar-worthy!) hair and makeup. That’s what this movie, being the opposite of subtle, needed from its lead actress, but it’s not clear to me that the actress needed to be Demi Moore, rather than any other sex symbol over the age of 50. Can you imagine it being a lesser performance if it were Sharon Stone? Kim Basinger? Julia Roberts?! Meanwhile, Margaret Qualley, who plays Sue, the younger version of Elisabeth Sparkle, got no Oscar nomination, despite having her own share of Grand Guignol “My teeth fell out right before I had to go onstage!” moments, moments in which she’s arguably more persuasive. (The actor inside the suit to play “Monstro Elisasue”? That’s Qualley.) Not to be on Sue’s side, because she’s already got youth and beauty going for her, but why?Demi Moore’s performance in The Substance isn’t even the most courageous, most convincing, or most nuanced performance that we got this year from a 1990s sex symbol playing a middle-aged woman struggling to come to terms with her own age. Even setting aside Pamela Anderson’s comeback role in The Last Showgirl, which earned her nominations from the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards but left her empty-handed on Oscar-nominations day, 2024 also gave us Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, delivering a turn that had quite a bit of its own awards momentum before Moore upstaged it from the Globes podium.Admittedly, much of the difference between Kidman’s performance in Babygirl and Moore’s in The Substance has to do with the movies that they’re in, with Babygirl having the sense to step back and give the space for its lead to do her thing. Babygirl may have no spinal births or weird yellow fluids flowing through tubing, but it still has plenty to say about being in an older female body, and rather than smothering Kidman in makeup and extreme close-ups, it lets her performance speak loud and clear. Babygirl is about sex: A married CEO has the life-changing revelation that she wants to be a sub to someone’s dom, and has to handle the fact that the guy she figured that out with is her intern. But much of the pathos of the situation arises from Kidman’s character coming to understand what her body wants so late in her body’s life, and Kidman’s face shows us every emotion, making it all believable, even when she’s doing something as silly as crawling across the floor to lap milk from a saucer.Some of the trappings are similar. Director Halina Reijn’s camera gently, but mercilessly, shows the contrast between 57-year-old Nicole Kidman’s artificially tightened and filled-up face and her normal fiftysomething hands, just as Moore lets Fargeat pull right into the big pores on her face. And if we’re judging bravery based on which elder actress showed her butt, I will admit that they both did this. (Also, let’s be real: They both look amazing! Moore looks so amazing at 62 that they aged her character down 12 years, to 50. More damning than any Hollywood satire in The Substance is the fact that Moore is considered brave for playing 12 years younger than she actually is.) But aside from that one makeup scene, The Substance leaves little room for the subtleties of feeling that Kidman conveys in flickers of shame and delight and excitement and defiance in every scene.I know. It’s not very Oscars-savvy of me to presume that it’s the performance that should make the Oscar. It’s Moore’s story, which she presented in capsule version on the Golden Globes stage, and which she recently told in a well-received 2019 memoir written with journalist Ariel Levy, that’s moving people here. Coming out of a tough childhood, Moore became an actress as a teenager, a Brat Pack icon as a twentysomething, and a big-earning box-office star in her late 20s and 30s, putting up a string of hits (Ghost in 1990, A Few Good Men in 1992, Indecent Proposal in 1993, Disclosure in 1994). Then there was her marriage to Bruce Willis, her wilderness period, doing TV and being part of ensemble casts, her marriage to much-younger actor Ashton Kutcher, and her drug-use issues over the years.The redemption arc an Oscar for her would offer is pretty unparalleled, at least among this awards season’s contenders. Kidman has also done her share of “popcorn acting,” but has worked too much lately, and gotten too many awards in the past, which I’m told makes for a bad narrative. Fernanda Torres, 59 years old, who’s nominated for I’m Still Here, is only the second Brazilian nominee for an acting Oscar; the first, back in 1999, was her own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who also appears in the movie, playing Torres’ older self. But Torres, despite herself having a long, illustrious career (she’s been described as “the Nicole Kidman of Brazil”) with no academy recognition, has this little problem where she’s unfamiliar, not American. Bad narrative!And yes, Moore’s history is pretty intense, and we love to see an older person suddenly find themself on the verge of achieving a long-desired goal. But when you take a closer look at the moral of this story, it kind of falls apart. Quoting an unnamed “woman” in her Globes speech, Moore said that one message of The Substance is: “Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.” But wait! Isn’t the Oscar Hollywood’s most famous measuring stick? And it’s not as if Moore has never gotten any reward for her work: Besides the multiple People’s Choice awards, Moore became, in the mid-1990s, the highest-paid actress in the world.Which is not even to mention the worthiness of Moore’s competitors for this award. As Wicked’s green-skinned and purportedly monstrous Elphaba, Cynthia Erivo delivers all the self-loathing that Moore does, except (to paraphrase the old line about Ginger Rogers) backwards, in bejeweled slippers, and while belting out songs in her three-octave range atop a broom. And Moore’s closest rival is Anora’s Mikey Madison, who, in one career-making performance, proves she could be a popcorn star and just about anything she wants, conveying the title character’s stormy emotional arc, from hope to angry desperation to alienation to sadness, all in a pitch-perfect Brooklyn accent with a side of Russian. (Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón, meanwhile, is a whole other story.)People in the industry seem to enjoy feeling as if Hollywood is more politically aware and savvy than it was when Moore was at her most powerful, when she was (as she’s said) “extremely shamed” for her huge paycheck for doing Striptease, and the academy can prove this by voting for Moore’s performance in this particular movie—supposedly showing itself to finally be on the right side of history. The academy might like how much Moore wants it, and be flattered by her excitement. And maybe it’s nice, if you’re an older academy voter, to believe that you, too, could still have a chance to do the things you longed to do when you were in your prime. “The universe told me that ‘you’re not done,’ ” Moore said in her speech, describing how she felt when the script for The Substance came to her. Looking at Moore’s year, you could make yourself believe that the same could be true for you. She’ll probably win! We’ll know more after the SAG Awards this weekend. But she shouldn’t.Slate is published by The Slate
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/02/substance-demi-moore-movie-oscars-2025-best-actress.html