I’m not mad about the Oscar winners this year. While the nominations themselves were a little boring – last year’s contests felt a lot more contentious and therefore a lot more interesting – I was thrilled to see Anora, an excellent film with an awe-inspiringly tiny budget of just $6 million, win a whopping five awards: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Directing, Best Film Editing, and Best Writing for an original screenplay.
I was also pleased as punch to see Kieran Culkin win Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain, a film that somehow had an even smaller budget of $3 million. Adrien Brody won Best Actor for The Brutalist, a film with a budget of under $10 million. These films were up against competition with budgets several times larger, and to see smaller films win these big awards warms my heart.
That said, I couldn’t help but pause when I saw that The Substance had lost all but one of the categories in which it had been nominated (a very deserved Best Makeup and Hairstyling), and I couldn’t help but find Demi Moore’s loss to Mikey Madison in Best Actress to be incredibly ironic. Not unfair, necessarily, but definitely ironic.
This Is The Plot Of The Substance
The Substance can be interpreted as a movie about many things: the male gaze; the beauty standards women are held to; addiction; the prevalence of plastic surgery and body modifications in the pursuit of eternal beauty. It’s also a body horror movie, and one that’s so competent at what it sets out to do that it can be incredibly difficult to watch, and an encouragingly unusual Oscar nominee to begin with. I, for one, walked away from my experience with it as impressed as I was upset.
But it’s in the film’s moment-to-moment storytelling that the irony comes through. In case you haven’t watched it yet – you should – here’s basically what happens. Elisabeth Sparkle, a once-popular and now somewhat irrelevant actress played by Moore, is dismissed from her long-running aerobics TV show on her 50th birthday. Presumably, she’s now too old to be on TV because anybody confronted with a middle-aged woman doing things will descend into existential terror, or something.
She ends up starting to take something called The Substance. There’s a lot of disgusting body stuff involved, but at the end of it, a younger, beautiful version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) emerges from a rip in her back. The new body, who calls herself Sue, replaces Elisabeth. Everybody loves Sue – she’s beautiful, young, hot. She gets the opportunities that were denied Elisabeth, despite them basically kind of being the same person.
Demi Moore Always Had Too Much Working Against Her
There were a lot of things working against The Substance at the Academy Awards. For one, horror movies rarely win – it seems the Academy doesn’t like horror, perhaps because of its longstanding perception as being lowbrow. What’s more, The Substance is a very out there film, even by horror standards. It’s absurd, outrageous, equally likely to make you laugh as it is to make you feel sick to your stomach, as I learned while fighting nausea during my viewing as the group next to me laughed out loud at the increasingly unbelievable events on-screen.
It looked for a little bit that Moore might be able to swing a win anyway. In the lead up to the awards, she won a Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award, Saturn Award, and a Screen Actors Guild award, all usually good indicators of an Academy win. But ultimately, she lost to Mikey Madison, a younger, beautiful actress, for the latter’s performance in Anora.
I don’t mean this as a slight against Madison at all. Like I said, I don’t really believe that Madison’s win was unfair. I, like every single woman in my row in the cinema, was sniffling and wiping my eyes by the time Anora wrapped. It was, without a doubt, an excellent performance. But I have to highlight the similarities. Madison played a sex worker in a film that focused largely on her beauty and attractiveness, framing her explicitly through the male gaze, a directorial choice that made a lot of sense given the subject matter.
Is this the entire reason that Madison won the award? Certainly not. But did Moore’s age work against her? Almost definitely. That was one of the points The Substance hammered home – people don’t really care about older celebrities because they’re not ‘desirable’ anymore. We all already knew The Substance was hitting on something incredibly real, but to see it actually play out at the Academy Awards mostly makes me sad.
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