Since Demi Moore arrived on screens as a teenager in a soap opera in 1981, she has achieved megastardom, amassed a fortune — she was once the highest-paid actress in the world — and been a lighting rod for fierce (and often critical) conversations about women’s bodies. On Thursday, at 62, she notched her first Oscar nomination, for best actress for her turn in “The Substance,” the body horror-satire with a feminist message. It’s a once-unexpected milestone for a woman whom a producer had derided as “a popcorn actress.”
Moore’s role as a fading celebrity seeking a shortcut to youth has earned her some of the best reviews of her career, and a Golden Globe win that undoubtedly propelled her chances with the academy, especially when she gave an emotional barnburner of a speech. Visibly shocked at the ceremony earlier this month, she noted that she had been in the business for more than four decades, with few accolades to show for it. The acknowledgment, she said, offered “the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.”
Moore first made her name with ’80s Brat Pack fare like “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and was nominated for a Globe in 1991, for the blockbuster romance “Ghost.” Hits like “Indecent Proposal” and “Striptease,” which gave her what was then a record $12.5 million paycheck, along with her marriage to fellow star Bruce Willis, made her a Hollywood phenomenon in the ’90s.
But the perception of her as merely a commercial performer, symbolized by the producer’s comment, “corroded me over time,” she said at the Globes. She had thought perhaps she was done with acting, but what she called “the magical, bold, courageous, out-of-the-box, absolutely bonkers script” for “The Substance” pulled her back in.
The brashly bloody “The Substance,” from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, was an unlikely Oscar contender; academy voters don’t tend to go for gore. But this year was an exception: the movie is in the running for best picture, and Fargeat also scored a nomination for best director.
“The Substance” follows Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, once an A-list star and now the host of a TV fitness show, as the industry summarily rejects her, simply for aging. Enter the mysterious potion of the title, which allows Elisabeth to birth a younger, more nubile version of herself (Margaret Qualley). Grotesqueries abound, both metaphorical and fleshy.
Fargeat aimed for an extreme, almost comical level of gross-out, and a critique of beauty standards. “‘The Substance’ is very much about what, as a woman, we have to conform to and how it impacts our life socially,” she said, before the film won the prize for best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
And Moore’s performance seemed to nod to her own image, and her past, as an object of lust, both fetishized and scolded for her form. (See especially: the furor over her naked and pregnant 1991 Vanity Fair cover, shot by Annie Leibovitz.)
She wrote in her best-selling 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” of how twisted her sense of self was, and how for years she suffered from disordered eating, and overexercised. “I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself,” she said in an interview last year.
It was one reason that “The Substance” so resonated with her, as she explained from the Globes stage. “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough, or skinny enough or successful enough, or basically just not enough. I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’”
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