In the midst of an emotional speech upon winning a Golden Globe for Best Female Actor in a Musical or Comedy, Demi Moore noted that this award represented the first such recognition of her career. Now, she would have to be talking about the win, rather than the various nominations she’s currently receiving for The Substance, because Moore has been nominated for two Golden Globes in the past: in this same category for Ghost (an even more dubious “musical or comedy” than The Substance), and in the category of Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Movie for If These Walls Could Talk, an HBO movie from 1996. But it’s true that the Globes represent Moore’s strongest recognition in terms of awards throughout her 40-year career.
Technically, Moore does have some other nominations and even wins to her name: As a producer of If These Walls Could Talk, she was also up for an Emmy, but her performance was not. She won an Independent Spirit Award as part of a collective: Best Ensemble, for the cast of Margin Call, which received a bunch of other, similar nominations from lower-profile groups, as did the ensemble for the forgotten drama Bobby. But Moore is absolutely correct that during her ’90s career heyday, she was considered more of a ”popcorn actress” who shouldn’t necessarily expect more prestigious recognition than her enormous success at the box office. What better proof than her decade-long presence at the MTV Movie Awards, where she was nominated a whopping nine times? (Three of them in the hilariously sketchy category of “Most Desirable Female”; one of those came for her notorious bomb The Scarlet Letter, by which was meant, that movie had nudity in it. MTV, ever prudish, did not follow suit for her similarly naked role in Striptease the next year.)
At the same time, being a popcorn actress in the 1990s was a lot more prestige-adjacent than it is today. Today, it means being Dwayne Johnson, and starring in four-quadrant “multiple verticals” garbage like Red One on the regular. Moore, on the other hand, starred in two bona fide Best Picture nominees: Ghost (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992). Weirdly, these otherwise disparate movies had similar nomination profiles: Both were nominated for Best Picture, Best Editing, and in a supporting category for acting (eventual winner Whoopi Goldberg for the former; Jack Nicholson for the matter). Neither movie was nominated for Best Director, nor in a leading-actor category.
This left Moore in good company; she may not have been nominated, but neither were Patrick Swayze or Tom Cruise. And honestly, though Moore is rock-solid in A Few Good Men playing what is essentially the second lead, even a supporting-actress prize was a tough road, putting her up against British vets like Vanessa Redgrave, Miranda Richardson, and Joan Plowright, plus intense Aussie Judy Davis. Amusingly, the eventual winner scored with bigger, brassier American courtroom scenes: Marisa Tomei, stealing My Cousin Vinny from Joe Pesci.
My Cousin Vinny was also a popular hit – though not the kind of popular hit that Moore tended to make. She stood out among the other commercially gifted performers of that era because – unlike Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Winona Ryder, or Sandra Bullock – she didn’t really make many comedies, instead focusing on dramas, often sexually charged ones like Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. Comedy isn’t exactly an awards shoo-in either, but the particular brand of Moore’s seriousness (and the way that an occasional Moore comedy like Striptease plays like she’s in a different movie from the rest to the cast) helped to turn almost every major role of hers into a relatively thankless task, allowing her to be upstaged by a wide variety of co-stars and extratextual controversies. Apart from A Few Good Men, which she plays so realistically straight-ahead that the performance lacks awards-clip showboating, her most trophy-baiting role of the decade was probably G.I. Jane, for which she threw her body into a gauntlet of extremes. The movie itself turned out to be a fairly insubstantial melodrama — well, that is, at least until Chris Rock brought it up at the Oscars — and award-season acclaim did not follow. Moore worked far less in the 2000s; her highest-profile role, as the bad guy in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, anticipated The Substance by casting her as a legendary beauty who may be self-conscious about being shoved aside for younger faces.
If Moore’s lack of ’90s awards success can be largely attributed to the movies themselves, she also may have suffered from a monopoly on seriousness from the likes of Jodie Foster, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, and Susan Sarandon, who all together accounted for a whopping 12 of the decade’s 50 Best Actress nominations. Take a look at a contemporary of Moore’s, also known for her beauty, also not exactly an acolyte of zany rom-coms: Michelle Pfeiffer scored a single Best Actress nomination in the 1990s, for the little-seen, little-remembered Love Field, a filler movie if there ever was one. A couple years later, Jessica Lange won the Oscar for Blue Sky, which had just gotten off the shelf after moldering there for two years. Truly, there are a remarkable number of 1990s Best Actress nominees for movies that nobody much talks about or watches these days; there was a feast of adult-targeted movies, yet sometimes a simultaneous famine of women-led options within the oft-narrow confines of Academy acceptability and respectability.
It’s no wonder, then, that Moore often found herself acting in what amounted to high-toned trash – grown-up movies unworthy of the movie-star charisma and serious conviction she’d bring to her roles. Even without the MTV distinction, she was often stuck playing Most Desirable: the wife who prompts a sleazy million-dollar offer in Indecent Proposal, the boss who sexually harasses a male employee in Disclosure, the woman who inspires her deceased partner to pierce the veil in order to save her. The Substance‘s rebuke of all that packaging is part of what makes the movie and the performance so illicitly thrilling. It’s not so much that Moore has never deserved recognition before The Substance, and more that The Substance – with its mix of humor and horror at what it takes to make yourself Most Desirable – feels like it’s the ideal vehicle for recognizing Moore.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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