It was a career highlight that “blew people away,” wrote Today. Her big moment “jolted awake” and stunned audiences, enthused the LA Times. And it was an “emotional career revelation,” as per The Independent.
Such were the heaps of praise showered onto Demi Moore—albeit not for her genuinely amazing career highlight in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. The performance itself was indeed a stunning tour de force where Moore personified the pressures felt by millions of women, be they entertainment legends or otherwise. In the film, Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is a former Oscar winner and movie star reduced to destroying her body in order to look young—quite literally after she expels Margaret Qualley out of her flesh in a scene that would make David Cronenberg proud. It’s a scenario that also has more than a passing resemblance to Moore’s own career and life, which she conveys with a ferocity that rings unmistakably, and painfully, true.
As terrific as Moore is in The Substance, though, those above lines of praise were not for her sterling work in the satirical body horror; it was for her victory speech after a surprise win at the Golden Globes.
Yep. Before the Globes, in their typically unpredictable manner, awarded Moore Best Actress in a “musical or comedy” (and The Substance is quite funny at times, in a decidedly gallows fashion), some wondered whether Moore would even be nominated for Best Actress by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This was no slight against Moore. It’s just that the Academy doesn’t typically nominate performances in horror movies. If you don’t believe us, ask Lupita Nyong’o after she was snubbed for Us in 2020, or Toni Collette after she also got the cold shoulder the year before that. And a case can be made that Collette gave one of the best performances of the 2010s in Hereditary.
When it comes to the Academy, there is a built-in antipathy toward genre storytelling in general, and horror in particular, which goes back generations. But after that Globes speech catapulted Moore to the forefront of the Academy and media’s attention, there might be an opening to change the notion of what an “Oscar movie” is.
The Horror Movies Nominated for Major ‘Above-the-Line’ Oscars
Prior to The Substance receiving its well-deserved Best Picture and Best Director nominations this year, there were only six previous horror films nominated in either category. And believe it or not, they are not the same six movies.
To date, the other horror films nominated for Best Picture remain William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Of those Spielberg still infamously received a Best Director snub in early ’76 (which he had the misfortune of recording for posterity). Prior to any of them, Alfred Hitchcock was grudgingly nominated in the helmer category for his paradigm-shifting effect on the medium via Psycho (1960).
Sixty-five years ago, the Academy reluctantly admitted it could not ignore the historic achievement of a film like Psycho, even if they were able to hold their noses tight enough to snub the game-changer for Best Picture in favor of such unremarkable fare as Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, and John Wayne’s horrendously bloated The Alamo. (To be fair: also The Apartment, which probably deserved its Best Picture win!)
The point is since the Academy’s inception, the horror genre has been seen as the gutter of Hollywood cinema. This goes even back to its earliest days with actors like Lon Chaney Sr. wowed audiences as “the Man of a Thousand Faces” in genre pictures that included the chiller The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and London After Midnight (1927). Universal Pictures built its legacy on the Monsters, but its first Oscar for Best Picture came not from Frankenstein or Dracula, but the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front.
And that was the early days. After horror in the 1940s and especially the ’50s became synonymous with “B-movies” and drive-in programmers, the genre remained on the fringe of “prestigious” cinema, even when the likes of Roman Polanski made something as transcendent as Rosemary’s Baby in 1968—a film that won Ruth Gordon an Oscar for a supporting, largely comedic performance. Otherwise, the film went ignored.
There have been checkered acting nominations throughout the Academy’s history, as well, and even the rarest of wins, a la Kathy Bates for a performance that again walks the line between scary and funny in Rob Reiner’s Misery (1990), but by and large horror has been kept at bay.
What Even Is an “Oscar Movie” These Days?
Yet it’s fair to wonder if the tide is turning. Beginning in the mid-2010s, the Academy and Hollywood community at-large has been undergoing a kind of reckoning. It started with the “#OscarsSoWhite” social media discourse of 2015, but it has expanded into a generational and cultural upheaval that has changed the composite of the 10,000 or so members that make up the Academy. In a bid to not only become more racially diverse but also demographically and generationally representative, hundreds of the Academy’s membership was culled by age. If you were a member who hadn’t worked in decades on a film or TV show (and had never previously won an Oscar), you lost the ability to vote. Meanwhile hundreds of younger and non-American filmmakers within the industry were invited in—folks who have less hang ups about “genre.”
After all, The Substance is directed by a French woman, and European institutions like the Cannes Film Festival show little qualms about awarding their most prestigious baubles to odd genre swings. See Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner Titane for more. Or just check in with Fargeat who won Cannes’ Best Screenplay award for The Substance.
Beyond horror, in the last decade, we’ve seen Academy tastes likewise shift. Black Panther became the first superhero movie nominated for Best Picture, and even a year before that, the less culturally affluent Logan became the first cape movie nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Psychological thriller/allegory Parasite became the first film not in the English language to win Best Picture in 2020 (it helped it was a masterpiece), and the Daniels’ genre-bending sci-fi/martial arts/dramedy epic, Everything Everywhere All at Once, took home the same top prize, as well as Best Director and a slew of other awards in 2023.
The Academy’s tastes are slowly but surely getting younger, hipper, and generally less burdened by the prejudices of their parents or grandparents. Or: the Academy membership is slowly tilting toward Gen-X and especially now older Millennials, the latter of whom were coming of age during the rise of so-called “elevated horror” cinema. (A condescending way to acknowledge the horror genre had a renaissance in quality beginning in the early 2010s.)
If Demi Moore wins a deserved Oscar for her turn in The Substance, it might partially be because of a poignant and honest speech about how even at the height of career in the early 1990s, she could be insulted and negged by men in the industry who dismissed her as a “popcorn actress.”
But it will also be because the Academy and many of the awards season hangers-on intelligentsia is finally seeing the genre differently. It’s not an overnight transition. We’d even argue Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is easily better than at least five of the films nominated for Best Picture this year, but tellingly no one in the Academy or its many prognosticators thought to even give it a chance. Because The Substance was in major consideration, there would never be room for two horror movies in the Oscars’ short lists for above-the-line awards.
Other snobbery still persists against the genre, as one one presumable gray-hair Academy crystallized in their anonymous report to Variety about how The Substance “was gross, over-the-top, and I don’t think Demi was anything special.” They apparently emphatically said they “despise” it. Meanwhile some culture gatekeepers all but clutched pearls while tut-tutting how The Substance left them “so overwhelmed by the volume of latex, fake blood, and barfed-up boobs, and so confused trying to puzzle through the story’s internal logic and parse its over-the-top third act, that I didn’t really register Moore’s performance at all.”
Here’s the thing though: that perception is now in the minority among the many gatekeepers of the American movie industry’s Oscar stage. Not only is Moore nominated, but so is Fargeat for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and of course, Best Picture.
A win for Moore in her lane would give the “popcorn actress” some long overdue validation for a career that has always been more than disposable entertainment. It could also help shatter the last illusion about what kind of film, or performance, is deserving of being labeled something as ephemeral as “the best.”
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