Why Demi Moore Will Win the Best Actress Oscar
We know that Demi Moore is overdue for an Oscar, having never been nominated, and that the Golden Globe was the first award she has ever won. And she gave a great speech that landed her the Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
But that narrative is not the only reason Moore will win her first gold man.
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The 62-year-old veteran has been on the awards stump since “The Substance” (MUBI) wowed Cannes. Coralie Fargeat‘s feminist body horror movie clearly plays well for a global audience (worldwide, it has grossed $77 million so far). But here’s the crucial thing that will put Moore over the top. At a recent Q&A with me at the WGA Theatre, as Moore sat with her tiny chihuahua Pilaf in her lap, the audience leaned in. They responded to her message of change and renewal, of freedom and uplift. They were listening to a spiritual guru.
“It just doesn’t always happen this way,” said Moore, who explained the movie’s impact on viewers as “touching our humanness, reminding them to be a little more kind and gentle to themselves. And reevaluating their own lives, where they’re giving too much value to the external and not enough to the internal.”
Women are making progress in Hollywood, she said, since she enjoyed her ‘90s run with such Hollywood hits as “Indecent Proposal,” “A Few Good Men,” “Ghost,” and “Striptease,” which generated negative feedback at the time, partly for her $12-million payday. There’s still a ways to go. “There’s too much focus on all that we’re not when we could be celebrating all that we are,” she said. “I can look at a film like ‘Anora,’ where she is playing a stripper, an exotic dancer, and look at my experience of playing a stripper, and how unprepared the world was to accept me in that role, and see how they’re embracing it. To see how they are recognizing her work in this without a hesitation, without a judgment that’s preconceived, they’re seeing past the external and seeing the humanness. That’s what we want, is stories about different humans. We want to find ourselves in these stories, and we’re all different, and that’s what makes our world interesting.”
Moore broke barriers all along, especially with Ridley Scott’s “G.I. Jane,” when she shaved her head and bulked up and showed what a woman could do, not just in the context of the movie, but as an actress. “I’ve had a lot of time during the course of talking about this film to look at where some of the threads are in films that I’ve chosen, but have also chosen me,” she said. “And one of the threads has been taking on roles that are also bringing up things that are provocative, not in a sexual way, but in the sense of it being thought-provoking, challenging the status quo. And for me, ‘G.I. Jane’ was definitely one of those that excited me, challenged me emotionally, but certainly physically. But it also addressed a big question of: ‘Why shouldn’t a woman be in combat, if she’s good at it and wants to be there, why wouldn’t we want her there?’ At that time, again, I don’t know if they were quite ready for that question, apparently, but it pushed me out of my own comfort zone, which is always a great barometer, because I know on the other side of whatever I step into, not only will grow as an artist, but I’ll grow as a person.”
Moore has always had a complex relationship with her body. When she shot “Indecent Proposal,” she rode a bike all the way to work every day. “I lived in Malibu, had a new baby I was feeding through the night, and would bike from Malibu to Paramount and then work a whole day,” Moore said. “It’s reflective of my own journey of being hard on myself. I had a lot of fear and that I attached around my body needing to be a certain way. I had a lot of pressure around having a lot of love scenes and also, as someone who had just had a baby, it felt like it was a time where, when I started to have my children, it was still looked at a little bit like you’re supposed to choose one or the other. And again, for me, I just didn’t understand that to be a truth. It didn’t seem to be a truth for me. I also felt a huge responsibility to show, ‘Yes, I can manage both. I can get back in shape, but I can do this film. I can show up. And feed the baby.’”
She continued, “I was a little crazy, because I look back now and go, ‘What was I trying to prove?’ But I appreciate that time, because in finding a greater acceptance of myself as I am right now, I had a greater compassion for who Elizabeth Sparkle is, for having put myself through such torturous experiences.”
“The Substance” made Moore fearless. “I came out on the other side of this with even more liberation within myself. And look, I went into this knowing this was going to be an extremely vulnerable, raw, challenging experience, that it was asking of me to share of myself emotionally and physically in ways that you might not want everyone to see of you, that it was not going to be glamorous,” the actress said. “In fact, it was going to be highlighting things in an even more exaggerated, distorted way. But the gift of that is like laying it out on the table. It removed the fear, because there isn’t anything that’s hiding, and it allowed me to share and really be seen, not for the outside, but for the depth of who I’ve become on the inside.”
Moore had to face herself in scenes when she was alone, looking at herself in the mirror. “The scene in the beginning when I have the substance and I’m nude and I’m looking at myself in the mirror and just being observed also while observing myself, because that’s where the camera was, it was a very exposing feeling. It was having to navigate whatever of my own ego came up and let go so that I can be present. I have a lot of scenes where I don’t have another actor to play off, but I only have myself. In the last couple of days I have thought about our human nature when we look in the mirror,” she said. “And how our nature is to not look for what’s right, but to look for what’s wrong. And so much of my prep work was so that I could create a full, rich, complete whole life for Elizabeth, and I went through every scene anchoring myself in because I didn’t have that luxury of someone else, so that I could be in dialog with myself. So there were thoughts, communication, conversation going on for me in every scene when I was alone, and even with that, when you don’t have someone else to have that barometer, there were days I definitely walked away going, ‘I hope this doesn’t become repetitive or tedious or not seem engaged,’ because I felt a responsibility to anchor this in reality, so that it could go to those other places. Without that, I don’t know if it would have as much depth or meaning.”
Moore has brought her awareness of what she learned from “The Substance” to her three daughters. She told her rapt audience, “[What] came out of one of those conversations was this idea of not wasting time focusing on all that you’re not when you could be celebrating all that you are. It’s when we fight against something that it leaves us diminished or smaller, contracted. When we embrace who we are truly as we are in whatever moment we’re at, whether we’re 20, 40, 60, 80, and we start to appreciate all of those different elements, our imperfections, then the world on the outside sees us for how we see ourselves. But we can’t wait for it to happen on the outside first. This is an inside job, and collectively we reclaim and hold that power, when we see the beauty in who we are. And by the way, we might be a little more loosely wrapped at 60 than we were at 30. But would you trade the gifts, the wisdom, the experience, for that? I can say I certainly wouldn’t!”
Next up: Moore is finishing up “I Love Boosters” in Atlanta with San Francisco filmmaker Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”). “It’s a different character for me,” she said. “She’s quirky and narcissistic, and [I was] working with a filmmaker who has vision but a centered sense of himself that he has the latitude to give everybody room to participate.”
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