During a night that had few surprises, Demi Moore’s Oscars loss for best actress stood out as unequivocally the biggest upset.
In a scene that seemed straight out of The Substance, Moore, the frontrunner for the Oscar for her lead role in the film, lost to Mikey Madison, the 25-year-old newcomer and star of the night’s best picture, the indie Anora.
As the camera trained its eye on her in front of the world, Moore looked a little shocked, but quickly recovered to smile and applaud. Madison looked similarly surprised and immediately overcome as she walked to the stage, the win capping off her meteoric rise from unknown to one of the most celebrated actresses in Hollywood.
Immediately, a lot of people had the same reaction. It’s giving Elisabeth and Sue.
In The Substance, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress who has seen her star fade in recent years. She’s gotten by with a role hosting her own fitness TV show, but is unceremoniously sacked by her odious boss Harvey (played by Dennis Quaid, and yes, the name is referring to that Harvey) on her 50th birthday.
Feeling bereft at the idea that her best years are behind her, Elisabeth responds to an ad she gets for “the substance,” an experimental drug that promises to transform her into a “a better version of herself.” What that actually means, we learn when Elisabeth injects herself with the drug, is that a literal hotter, younger version of herself is created, crawling out of Elisabeth’s spine by bursting out of her flesh.
The two versions of Elisabeth, the original and the new one called Sue (Margaret Qualley) must switch out every week in order to keep them both alive. But Sue soon becomes addicted to her new life, where she gets Elisabeth’s old fitness show job (which is rebranded as an extremely titillating, male-gazey spectacle), goes on dates, and parties with new friends. When she stops “respecting the balance” and extending her time past a week, both versions of Elisabeth begin to break down, with horrific and disgusting consequences.
The film’s director and writer, Coralie Fargeat, has said in interviews that she was inspired by her own experience turning 40, and the overwhelming feeling that her life as she knew it as a woman was over. She began to have intrusive thoughts that she was “going to be erased from the society,” she told Elle, that she had exited the window during which she was most valuable.
“It was like a super depressing collapse in my personal life,” she told the magazine.
Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley attend the 30th Annual Critics Choice Awards.Michael Kovac/Getty Images
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