It’s hard to know how many Oscar voters have turned in their ballots with just one day left. Were they waiting for today to do the dirty deed or had they done it already? The question will be how many friends does Demi Moore have in the Academy? That is the main reason she would be winning, in addition to a long career paying dues and managing to last this long. Her role is The Substance is less of a substantial lead as it is a co-lead and that might be the problem. Even if Margaret Qualley was not nominated, her role is as big and noticeable as Demi’s, which could be among the only reasons Demi might lose, if she does lose.
There is a recent history of actresses winning at BAFTA then at the Oscars, even if they don’t win the SAG. But much of the time, they’ve already won the Golden Globe in Musical/Comedy. In this case, both actresses were in the same category, which disrupts the pattern somewhat. The Globe voters are also a whole new batch of 300 where they used to be only 90.
But if you did go by precedent and the Golden Globes, finding an Oscar winner that didn’t win at least one or the other category at the Globes is nearly impossible. It did happen in 2020 when Frances McDormand came out of nowhere and won the BAFTA and then the Oscar, and the following year, Jessica Chastain didn’t win at the Globes or BAFTA and still won the Oscar:
Anora landed in the race when it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Oddly enough, neither Mikey Madison or Demi Moore won that year. Instead, the jury awarded all of the actresses in Emilia Perez. You can say they deserved it over Madison or Moore, but I never thought so.
Madison’s Anora, as I’ve been saying, is the performance of the year. The only reason she hasn’t been winning is that she didn’t do the publicity thing early on, but now, in the past month, she has. She’s been everywhere. The reason that matters—as gross of a ritual it is—is so that people can see how different she, the actress, is from the character, and that usually explains why the performance is award-worthy.
In Demi Moore’s case, she isn’t really playing a different character so much as she is playing a darker side of her own — and every woman’s own — personality. She would be winning more because of the length of her career, having never won, but also the lengths she goes to as an actress in this movie, uglying herself up, showing her full naked body, etc. It’s brave. The movie does put people off, though, especially men. The last 20 minutes are a hard sit and might not exactly win over hearts and minds.
On the other hand, Demi Moore is part of a robust coalition and girl squad that helped push Andrew Riseborough through that one year. So the girl squad could be out in force again moving and shaking behind the scenes.
The Academy is massive now, swollen to 10,000 members, with 3,000 or so of those international voters who were added after accusations of racism hit the industry. They wanted to change the Academy’s demographics and tried hard to do that. How those voters will vote is not yet known.
According to Statista, from 2012 to 2022, the Academy’s male-to-female ratio decreased from 77% to 67%, a full ten points. That doesn’t necessarily mean that more women will be inclined to vote for Demi Moore over Mikey Madison. It might but as with all things Oscar, we’re sometimes advised to follow our hearts and our hearts take us right to Mikey Madison, the Cinderella of the Oscars.
A few days ago, Kris Tapley made the point on Twitter that Mikey Madison is the whole movie so why would they award the movie and not her? That’s a great question. They would only do so because they wanted to award Demi Moore because it makes them feel better doing so.
Madison’s Ani is a fascinating character because the actress has a face that is fighting off sadness, even if she isn’t sad. She has almost a comical smile and something about her expressions with that Marilyn Monroe voices makes her compelling to watch.
We first meet her bathed in blue light as the sex worker of every man’s dream. We then see the real her, a stark contrast with the sex worker Ani. Julia Roberts plays a bit with this trope in Pretty Woman – and indeed, Anora nods to Pretty Woman a couple of times to toy with the viewer as if to say, we know what you want. We know you want the fairy tale. You want the happy ending. You want things to work out for Ani.
Then, there is the element of the film that is not talked about enough, and that’s what it says about class, specifically, class disparity in this country or any country. Sean Baker is well aware of class and depicts those left behind in all of his films but here, we get a Russian oligarchy as a symbol of absolute and unlimited wealth and power. That they decide to crush a working girl barely getting by is itself a comment on class, not to get all highfalutin on you.
What we don’t see much of, beyond Sean Baker’s films, are stories about class. That’s because the new ideology of the Left — the woke madness — has us seeing people only by identity and that is how they rank them. The richest people in the world can be seen as marginalized or oppressed if they are in one of the identity groups. And the poorest people can be seen as oppressors because they are born white.
We’ve forgotten about class because it has become inconvenient for a political movement that feeds off of two contradictory elements: the side with all of the power also has to be the oppressed side. Nothing has hurt Hollywood storytelling more than this madness, in my view. It’s always the same story told over and over again.
It does feed the desires of the rich on the Left, as we can see by the speech given at the Writers Guild Awards by its president, Meredith Stiehm, who made her speech agonizingly political – once again broadcasting that she is among the oppressed resistance. But that’s their get-out-of-jail-free card, their absolution – if the reversed power hierarchy remains in place, the wealthiest and most powerful have eternal absolution. But it also keeps those marginalized groups in the same place too. They never have a way out except if it’s bestowed upon them by the Good People of the Left.
And it’s why Tom Hanks felt emboldened to mock Trump supporters as racists on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary. It was all about class and how the rich abuse their power by calling those who are not in their class “racists” and sending the message that, despite the election, they are still not invited into “their” culture.
But this isn’t really comedy so much as it is amplifying the message of the establishment power, something the Left hasn’t had for decades, if ever. But rather than appeal to the working class as they used to do in Hollywood, everything seems to aim upward. It’s either identity-focused films or films about those who have the luxury to indulge in existential angst. But not Sean Baker. He doesn’t make movies like that, even if only a certain segment of the population knows about or watches his films. At least he tells stories that are universal and do not push any kind of dogmatic preordained conclusion.
This is why we, artists who are free in the mind can depict stories like Anora that tell a universal truth about power and class not just in our country but all over the world. I’ll never stop being impressed with Baker’s Anora, and much of that has to do with a captivating, unpredictable, heartbreaking performance by Mikey Madison. He was right to choose this actress to tell this story. We love her the instant we see her, and once we know she’s off on the Hero’s Journey, we are invested in making sure she lands on her feet and things turn out okay for her in the special world that seeks to chew her up and spit her out.
But will she win? That’s a harder question to answer. There are so many factors at play. I imagine Demi Moore could win at SAG and the Oscar remains an open question.
Demi Moore is beloved in the industry and she’s probably not going to get another at bat. But as we know from the past, voters vote with their hearts. If Mikey Madison touched their heart, she might win, per the Kris Tapley theory of Nomadland and Frances McDormand, not to mention Diane Keaton and Annie Hall, etc.
At the moment, I’m leaning Madison. But who knows? Your guess is as good as mine. So what do you think, Oscarwatchers? Let’s have a poll:
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