They Are One: Attempting to Break Through the Best Actress Debate
For a couple of months, it sure felt like we were in for a weird 2025 Oscars night.
Early on in the awards cycle, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning ANORA seemed as close to a frontrunner lock as you could get for Best Picture. Then, after an unbelievable run during the Golden Globes in January, the transgender musical EMILIA PEREZ emerged as the Movie of Destiny, although afterwards people curiously had this habit of watching it and noticing that, hey, they didn’t like it all that much. From there, the Best Picture race seemed perpetually wide open, with arguments to be made for a variety of nominees. Would Academy voters default to the Pope selection drama CONCLAVE? Would they start to gravitate towards the Bob Dylan biopic A COMPLETE UNKNOWN? Would Brazilian film I’M STILL HERE build some dark horse momentum? Would THE SUBSTANCE come out of nowhere to win it all, destroying everything we thought we understood about the Oscars? There was this very real sense that almost anything could happen during the grand finale of the 97th Academy Awards.
Then the grand finale came and the big winner was…ANORA.
For the most part, the entire Oscars in 2025 was like that. Every major award seemed to have some sort of upset narrative brewing, only for the initial frontrunner to emerge victorious. After a couple of months where the Best Actor award seemed a bit in flux (would Timothee Chalamet’s late push snag him a very-openly-coveted trophy?), the big winner was the guy that was projected to get it all along, Adrian Brody, whose acceptance speech is just about to wrap up. Despite Adriana Grande fans’ best wishes, Best Supporting Actress ultimately went to the heavy favorite, Zoe Saldana. On and on.
There was one surprise. A healthy horse race for Best Actress had developed since the Golden Globes, when Demi Moore won an award for her performance in THE SUBSTANCE and gave a well-loved speech. From there, her and long-projected-favorite ANORA star Mikey Madison seemed to trade off major accolades. Moore racked up wins at the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, while Madison picked up a BAFTA. At the end of the day, though, the 2025 Best Actress Oscar went to Madison. The reaction to this result from people online seemed a little…split.
This brings me to what I wanted to quickly talk about, mainly so I can stop thinking about it.
A common refrain* I’ve heard regarding Madison’s victory over Moore is that it perfectly makes THE SUBSTANCE’s point. Here’s a female Hollywood veteran, who had seemingly been cast aside by the industry, then built herself back up, only to have the ultimate prize snatched from her by a girl in her twenties. Hollywood likes ‘em young. And I found that to be memorable the first time I heard it, because it is a really funny observation, considering that film’s story of an aging female personality losing her show-biz job, and having to become a prettier, younger woman in order to gain it back.
*Although my lawyer* has compelled me to clarify that I first heard this from my friend Sean’s girlfriend Lauren.
** My lawyer is my friend Sean.
But then I kept hearing this line again and again from people, and it seemed to quickly shift from “funny observation” into “genuine criticism”, with the underlying implication that the Academy’s decision to award Madison over Moore was inherently age-ist. And, having seen and enjoyed both ANORA and THE SUBSTANCE, I feel like…uh, this is a bizarre takeaway?
So, I wanted to quickly go over both performances (which are VERY different from each other), why I like them both (for different reasons) and why one winning over the other does not necessarily point to some sort of age-driven conspiracy. Let’s go! Don’t be mad at me!
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“I like Anora.”
The hype surrounding ANORA was unusual for a movie of its nature. Rather than a superhero blockbuster or mega-franchise sequel, ANORA is a patient, tone-shifting character piece, featuring healthy amounts of both nudity and profanity. Yet, you couldn’t see a trailer for it that didn’t list its thousand accolades alongside a million pull-quotes from reviews, all implying that this movie was going to rock your fucking world. And, look, this is quite the check it was writing for itself, but the marketing seemed to work, at least on me. From the second I saw the trailer, ANORA seemed very appealing; going into it, I was genuinely excited for it in a way I hadn’t been for a movie in a really long time.
This all sounds like I’m leading up to a disappointing experience. I’m not. It turns out I indeed loved ANORA. Just…not right away.
ANORA is never less than good, but it did initially take some time for me to warm up to it. Its first 45 minutes is fairly standard, as we follow the titular character (who is very careful to refer to herself as “Ani”) through the fateful night at the strip club that employs her, as she meets Vanya, a young and rich Russian who will eventually, briefly, become her husband. It’s all initially charming, as lap dances become private house calls, then a proposal, leading to a Vegas wedding (a sequence that I found so joyfully overwhelming, with Ani and Vanya parading around The Fremont Street Experience, that I teared up a tiny bit). But, in texture, ANORA at first seems to be all young post-teens fucking, partying, fucking some more, and just enjoying being young and rich. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but when you have the “Palme d’Or winner” tag in the back of your mind, you keep waiting for the transcendence to begin.
For me, ANORA really kicks in at about the fifty-minute mark or so, when Vanya’s family, furious that he’s married a prostitute, sends three goons to his house to force an annulment. This is where ANORA’s centerpiece sequence kicks in, a madcap home invasion scene that operates on the same logic as a Looney Tunes cartoon. Ani fights, spits, throws everything not tied down, gets tied down, breaks a guy’s nose. The movie becomes a weird screwball comedy (with a healthy dose of UNCUT GEMS-esque anxiety thrown into the mix) pretty much out of nowhere. Pretty much every person I’ve talked to about ANORA has concurred that this middle section is where the movie comes alive, where it becomes something special.
But…I’ve been thinking a lot about how ANORA functions, and why that middle section pops so much. And, yes, a lot of it has to do with the comic beats, with the unbelievable amount of F-bombs that come flying out of Ani’s mouth*, with the unexpected violence in a movie that had been pretty serene up to that point, as well as the fact that Ani’s methods of defense have a lot of satisfying crystal-clear escalating logic built into them (throwing things leads to punching and kicking, which leads to yelling and screaming the word “rape”). Also, the bumbling performances of Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, and Vache Tovmasyan add so much extra color to the movie’s pallet. It’s been said a lot, but the three really do steal the show; they seem so simultaneously furious and humiliated to be eating this much shit in front of a 25-year old sex worker.
*Enough to make ANORA the movie with the fifth-most amount of “fucks” in the history of the medium, just behind THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and…UNCUT GEMS. However, I will say that the top two movies are SWEARNET: THE MOVIE and FUCK, movies that seem designed to make their way to the top of lists like this. When I’m president, I’m signing an Executive Order on Day One recognizing WOLF OF WALL STREET, UNCUT GEMS and ANORA the true top three “fuck” movies.
But…I think an unsung reason why Act II is such an audience favorite is that, through Madison’s performance in Act I, what’s at stake for Ani is so clear. The real reason we connect with that home invasion scene, why we thrill with every punch Ani throws, why our heart sinks as her wedding ring gets ripped off her finger…it’s because Madison gave us the road map in that first 45 minutes.
There is some criticism of ANORA that I understand. It’s a little long, and you do start feeling it at a certain point, especially the section where everyone is wandering around New York looking for Vanya. There’s also a lot of potential criticism of ANORA that I defer to others’ experience and opinions; there’s an especially wide array of opinions on it in the sex worker industry (some really seem to like it, others find it a little stereotypical and even hypocritical). A common critique I don’t get about ANORA, however, is the claim that the movie doesn’t give us enough of Ani’s inner life, a reason to care, even claiming that Anora is a passenger in her own story.
I totally disagree, and the reason I disagree is because Mikey Madison takes the beats regarding Anora that Sean Baker’s script does provide us, and makes them feel real. No, I suppose there’s no real hard insight into why Ani has certain eccentricities, such as why she rejects being called her full name, or why she seems hesitant to speak Russian (although I’d make the argument that there is indeed enough there for you to put it all together), but I’m also not sure the “why” matters all that much. We just need to know that she does. To put it another way, I don’t know that Ani delivering a big trauma-fueled monologue would have made the movie better in a way that is significant.
There’s been concern from some about the fact that Ani wants a better life than her boring strip-club job and her shitty apartment with a roommate she doesn’t connect with. What the fuck, is this the movie saying that sex work is un-aspirational or something? And, again, I’m not a sex worker, so my feelings on this may be moot. But, from the outside, I feel like this is a mis-diagnosis to some degree. I think the only thing that matters is that Ani doesn’t find stripping wholly satisfying. She doesn’t seem particularly ashamed of it; she’s more beaten down by those who see her as lesser (and I think those are two different things). It’s why, against her better judgment, Vanya seems so exciting. He’s rich, he’s rebellious, he’s impulsive…everything her boring Brooklyn apartment isn’t. It doesn’t hurt that he seems genuinely enamored of her. Interested in connecting with her, even if that connection is just sex in the shower.
And that, to me, is why the home invasion is dramatic. Because these dudes coming in to break up the marriage, these guys on the payroll of a woman who will later refer to Ani as nothing but a “disgusting hooker”...they represent the system working to kick girls like Ani out. Someone decided she wasn’t the right person to be in the club, so they literally tie her up and kick her out. So, fuck it, you hope she kicks them all in the face some more. It’s why, when one of the goons (Igor) decides to be awkwardly sweet to her, you start going “oh, I hope they get together”. You want so badly for someone to be actually nice to her, for her to succeed. It’s what makes the somewhat ambiguous ending* so heartbreaking; you hope that she can accept him, but who knows? Ani’s clearly been through a lot.
*Which was all so clearly inspired by Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA that I’m annoyed I didn’t make the connection until Baker pointed out the two movies’ connections in an interview.
In the hands of a lesser performance, all of this might have collapsed. ANORA hinges on us going with it through at least two tonal shifts, and some character ambiguity; better movies have failed attempting less. But…ANORA doesn’t. Madison internalizes all of these feelings, this history, this sense of wanting something more than what you have and…makes it feel lived in and real, without the crutch of a big expository soliloquy making text out of the subtextual. It’s why she was a front-runner for major acting awards from the beginning, and it’s possibly why she won the big one a couple of weeks ago.
Simply put, there is no ANORA without Mikey Madison.
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“You are one.”
I was shocked at how much I ended up liking THE SUBSTANCE.
By all accounts, it’s not the kind of movie I typically gravitate to. It’s a film with an instantly intriguing premise (“what if there was a goop that allowed you to go back and forth between your present self and a much younger, hotter version of yourself?”) that also makes its points about beauty standards and then is happy to repeat them over and over and over again. It’s heavily stylized, which I sometimes worry is used in movies to mask a lot of nothing going on. It’s also gleefully grotesque, in every way that word can mean. It certainly feels like a movie that would easily find its audience, but I never considered I’d be among it.
Part of what allowed THE SUBSTANCE to crawl under my skin was the setting in which I viewed it. My wife and I were lucky to catch it in a small, twenty-five seat micro-cinema. When I say small, I’m talking, like, carved out of the side of a building, small. The lack of size forced a weird amount of intimacy between the movie and the audience. Due to the forced scale, the screen felt like it towered over us. Even if you were in the lobby grabbing another beer, or in the bathroom saying goodbye to the previous beer, you could still hear THE SUBSTANCE’s pounding electronic score loud and clear. You couldn’t escape it.
So you just submitted to it.
And, make no mistake, THE SUBSTANCE is a movie you must submit to if you have any chance of liking it at all. As mentioned, it’s a satire that plays its notes broad; just as an example, we know Dennis Quaid’s producer character is gross by our up-close viewing of his sauce-covered shrimp eating. It’s also one of those movies where every line feels like it was translated from another language back into English (undoubtedly due to its French origins), making every single actor’s delivery weirdly unsettling and not quite right. Finally, THE SUBSTANCE has length issues, with a runtime of 141 minutes (officially two minutes longer than ANORA). It all leaves you feeling exhausted by the end.
But…what can I say? I ended up liking it for all those reasons. It’s been a long time since a movie felt like it picked me up and shook me by being so aggressively itself. I might have felt differently if I had pulled it up on my TV, but in that small setting, it really felt like I had been on a ride. And what I kept coming back to when I reflected back on THE SUBSTANCE in the weeks since is Demi Moore’s performance.
(Okay, well, I also reflected back a lot on Margaret Qualley’s performance, especially the seeming lack of awards recognition for her, which I found baffling considering she is literally carrying half the lead role load in THE SUBSTANCE. But, I digress.)
THE SUBSTANCE is the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood Walk of Fame actress who, at the time of her fiftieth birthday, has been relegated to hosting a vague aerobics program*. Her producer Harvey (Quaid) lets her know she’s been replaced. Humiliated and morose, Elisabeth learns of the titular Substance, a green liquid that, upon injection, takes her DNA and bursts forth a younger version of her…from out of her spine. The rules are simple, but consequential: you must switch back every seven days, no exceptions. You must also keep your dormant self fed during the week. And, finally, never forget: you are one.
*A lot of the details in THE SUBSTANCE are vague. Sue goes on a talk show called “The Show”. The final act centers around an event known simply as “The New Year’s Eve Show”. Stuff like that. It’s possible others will find this lazy, but I found this as funny commentary on the generic nature of current entertainment.
Elizabeth Sparkle is a great look for Moore, and frankly is the kind of performance the Academy tends to lap up with a spoon. Moore gets to be big, big, big, and allows herself to be gradually covered in thicker and thicker prosthetics, as her younger counterpart Sue (Qualley) takes longer and longer to switch back to her older self, causing further and further deformities to appear on Elizabeth’s body. First, a rotted finger. Then boils on the skin. Thinning of the hair. From there…well, that would be giving it away.
THE SUBSTANCE’’s point is obvious here: the more you try to recapture youth, the uglier you get. It’s two-and-a-half hours of this. Here’s the thing about it, though: Moore is able to use her very, very famous profile and persona to weirdly ground this bizarre movie. In real life, she’s still unbelievably gorgeous at the age 62, so it’s legitimately frustrating to watch her getting fired and abused for being too old at 50. We’re kind of rooting for her to work her way back up via Sue. We weirdly want the substance to work out for her! We know that it won’t! But we want it to! Because we like Demi Moore! Her standout moment (and the moment I became convinced she had supplanted Madison as the Best Actress frontrunner) is the already-famous scene where she ends up missing a date with a very nice-sounding guy because she can’t bring herself to leave the house. As she keeps running into the bathroom to screw with her makeup, terrified that she’s no longer beautiful enough to be loved..it’s heartbreaking stuff.
I think without Moore, THE SUBSTANCE could legitimately have been a chore. But it does have Moore. So, instead, it’s a rather gripping body horror satire, as we watch someone we adore slowly deteriorate in order to try to provide what it seems other people would wish she had.
Simply put, there’s no SUBSTANCE without Demi Moore.
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So, fine, we have two actresses who are completely vital to their respective movie’s success, who couldn’t be swapped out for anyone else. How does that disprove the fact that Demi Moore, an aging star who certainly appeared to have all the momentum going into the Oscars this year, losing to Mikey Madison, a woman forty years younger, appears to prove the point that THE SUBSTANCE was trying to make?
Well, let’s start with the fact that Mikey Madison and Demi Moore are two different people. I know that I sound super flippant here, but it’s worth remembering that in THE SUBSTANCE, Elisabeth and Sue are the same person (they are one!). Even if they were up for the same award, or if Elisabeth were the frontrunner for something that Sue took away from her at the last second (neither of which are really things that happen in THE SUBSTANCE), it wouldn’t be a good corollary because, again, Madison and Moore are not two sides of the same coin. Besides this awards race, their lives don’t really correlate in any meaningful way at the moment (outside of, I suppose, the fact that Moore was once young, and Madison will one day be old).
Also, here’s the thing about the Oscars. It’s something that seems obvious, but can be easily forgotten about in the wake of a personal fave losing: it’s a zero-sum game. In order for someone to win, four other people have to lose, basically no matter what. Ties happen so infrequently at the Academy Awards that they instantly become the stuff of legends when they do. It’s only happened six times in almost a hundred years, most recently in 2013*. However, the most famous was in 1969 when Best Actress went to both Katharine Hepburn (for THE LION IN WINTER) and Barbra Streisand (for FUNNY GIRL).
*Best Sound Editing ended in a tie between SKYFALL’s Per Hallburg and Karen Baker Landers and ZERO DARK THIRTY’s Paul N. J. Ottosson.
Now, I might have personally advocated for both Madison and Moore to win Best Actress. Why not! They both deserved it, for completely different reasons! But Madison won out, and there are no runner-ups. I mention the obvious because it hopefully makes clear that there isn’t necessarily an age-ist conspiracy behind Moore’s loss; it’s exceedingly possible that the voting members of the Academy saw two great performances and a (possibly slight) majority thought Madison was better. If there’s any “conspiracy” at all, it might be that members may have picked up on ANORA’s overall momentum in the final days of the voting window and let that influence their vote somewhat. I don’t know that for a fact, but ANORA’s ultimate mini-sweep suggests this is a possibility.
But, okay, let’s say you’re still not convinced. Let’s say the only possible reason Mikey Madison won Best Actress is because she’s a pretty girl who showed off her body*. If that were the case, it would actually represent something of an anomaly on the part of the Academy. Someone on Reddit did the math on the average age of Best Actress winners, and it’s hovering around 37. 37 is not a particularly young or old age; it might be the most average age that could possibly exist. And that’s my point; this implies a fairly even distribution of Best Actress winners throughout the last hundred years. Hell, even taking a look at the last few winners, this is a particularly bad time to call age-ism; Michelle Yeoh and Frances McDormand won in the last five years.
*This is what I think people are subconsciously getting at with their criticism, so it’s worth remembering that Demi Moore also briefly goes nude in THE SUBSTANCE.
Look, lord knows I’m not defending the business practices or tastes of your average Academy member. Please do not take any of this as me saying that Oscar winners are always merit-based, and the Academy always gets it right. I just don’t see a conspiracy in this particular instance, nor do I see this as some sort of proof that older actresses will just never have a chance at big Oscar awards, because voters’ thirst for young flesh will just never be satiated. Demi Moore totally, 100% deserved to win. But so did someone else, and as a result, she didn’t. That’s how it goes sometimes.
If I may, I think this all is more of a reflection on how online discourse can cause people to gas each other up, even if it’s over something relatively harmless like having a favorite nominee in an Oscar category. Friendly factions form over stuff all the time (and yes, it happened over “Madison vs. Moore”), and when your person loses, it feels like you lost some sort of a battle. “Fuck! Now the ANORA stans on Reddit are going to be so annoying!” I get it. I get this way online over things a lot dumber than liking movies. But, if this sounds familiar to you, I hope this provides you permission to not conspiracy-hunt over something you had no control over in the first place.
Finally…I can also feel some people reading all of this and going, “hey, I just thought pointing out similarities to THE SUBSTANCE was funny. Stop yelling at me, guy!” And that’s fair. As I stated at the beginning, I think this all started with everyone having the same funny thought, and bonding over it. I love that! But when it turns into a legitimate critique, or becomes a rallying cry to defend or attack actresses you’ve never met…well, I don’t see it, nor do I get it. I’d rather just reflect on two stunning performances from two really cool movies that made me happy to leave my house and spend a few bucks on a weekend evening.
In that sense, Mikey Madison and Demi Moore are one.