Those of us rooting for the Demi Moore comeback story to be complete with a best actress win at the Oscars were left disappointed Sunday night. That prize instead went to Mikey Madison for her tour de force performance in Anora, which conquered the night. Writer-director Sean Baker’s thrilling sex worker tragicomedy also took home the Oscars for best picture, director, editing and original screenplay.
“I also just want to recognize and honour the sex worker community,” said Madison when accepting her Oscar. “I will continue to support and be an ally. All of the incredible people, the women, I had the privilege of meeting from that community have been one of the highlights of this incredible experience.”
Moore, 62, was largely predicted to win at the Academy Awards for a performance in the twisted sci-fi body horror thriller The Substance which claws at your insides. She plays a celebrity fitness instructor who, after being discarded by an exploitative and ageist entertainment industry, turns to an experimental serum that spawns a younger version of herself. The plot of The Substance – where the younger starlet proceeds to steal the spotlight – resonated on Oscar night, when Madison, 25, took the stage instead of Moore.
If Moore had momentum going in, winning for her lead performance at the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards, it was largely due to a conflation between the star and the character she was playing, both having endured the predatory sides to the business. Moore broke out as part of the so-called “Brat Pack” appearing in St. Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night and would go on to turn heads not just for her roles in Indecent Proposal and G.I. Jane, but also when she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, very pregnant and nude. In her Golden Globes acceptance speech, she spoke to the way craven Hollywood producers saw her, exploiting her looks to sell tickets but never believing she was good enough to receive the acclaim and recognition of actors who were taken more seriously. She later faded from the limelight, struggling with substance abuse and codependency, themes that would appear in The Substance, a film very intentionally built around Moore’s persona and history.
An Oscar win would not just have been a reward for that performance but a way for the industry to slap a happy ending on that narrative Moore shares with her character, while finally giving her the overdue recognition she deserves.
But Oscar voters don’t necessarily give credence to such narratives (see also Mickey Rourke’s comeback with The Wrestler). They instead tend to favour the kind of capital-A acting that Madison delivers, and Anora is entirely built on. That film puts a more gritty and authentic spin on the Pretty Woman fairy tale when a sex worker makes it exclusive with someone rich. Madison pulls off a highwire act, balancing Anora’s very 40s-era screwball comedy vibes (think His Girl Friday) with its devastating social realist take on class, economics and modern labour.
The Other Big Contenders
Best picture winner Anora (presented by legendary Oscar host Billy Crystal and his When Harry Met Sally co-star Meg Ryan) edged out both The Brutalist and Conclave, which were seen as frontrunners in the category at one point or another.
The former is Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian holocaust survivor who tries to acclimatize to new hostilities in America. The operatic indie was celebrated for its use of VistaVision, the same film format Alfred Hitchcock shot North By Northwest with, and including a 15-minute intermission, harkening back to cinematic traditions that modern multiplexes don’t usually make room for.
The Brutalist won Oscars for its cinematography and score, while Brody ended up taking home his second Academy Award for an undeniable lead performance, fine-tuning the devastating notes he played in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.
You might be pleased to know that Brody didn’t assault presenter Cillian Murphy the way he famously did Halle Berry when accepting his first Oscar in 2003, forcibly planting a kiss on the Monster’s Ball actress in a move that at the time was dismissed as playful but doesn’t sit as comfortably today. Berry took that kiss in stride, then and now. She was in attendance at the awards on Sunday and playfully planted a revenge kiss on Brody while he was giving Access Hollywood an interview on the red carpet.
Brody bested another long overdue leading man: Ralph Fiennes, nominated for the first time since The English Patient. In Conclave, both Fiennes, 62, and legendary screen queen Isabella Rossellini, 72, give terrifically whispery and meditative performances – though perhaps so understated that they failed to make a memorable impression on Oscar voters. They play a cardinal and nun, respectively, overseeing a tense papal election after the very progressive Francis-coded pope passes, and more backsliding conservative forces threaten to win over. That film now feels eerily of the moment, not just in the ways it captures the current political climate, but also given the current pope’s deteriorating health. Observers online couldn’t resist suggesting that the Vatican’s recent updates are all part of Conclave’s Oscar campaign.
Rossellini – who made her film debut almost 50 years ago playing a nun opposite her mother Ingrid Bergman in A Matter of Time – was nominated for her performance in the supporting actress category. She stunned at the Oscars dressed in blue velvet, arriving alongside her Blue Velvet co-star Laura Dern as a tribute to the late director David Lynch.
Surviving Emilia Pérez
Zoe Saldana ultimately nabbed the supporting actress prize, dedicating it to powerful women and her immigrant grandmother who arrived in the U.S. from the Dominican in 1971 – her speech speaking to Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign without naming it. “I am the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award,” Saldana announced. “And I know I will not be last.”
Saldana’s win – along with the song El Mal, which picked up the best original song prize from presenter Mick Jagger – survived the catastrophic train wreck that is Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s loopy and regressive narco musical, about a trans cartel boss receiving gender affirming surgery, managed to score a leading 13 nominations, despite criticism from trans and Mexican voices over the way it treats marginalized communities and their traumas as spectacle without genuine empathy. For a while, many assumed Emilia Pérez would win the best picture prize. But those hopes were scuttled when Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi discovered that star Karla Sofía Gascón, 52, had been posting racist and Islamophobic tweets for years, all of which were left on her now-deactivated X page for anyone to see.
Host Conan O’Brien addressed the tweets in his opening monologue, with Gascón in the audience: “Little fact for you, Anora uses the F word 479 times. That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofia Gascon’s publicist.”
Gascón was central to Emilia Pérez’s Oscar campaign, and not just because she plays the titular character. She’s the first openly trans acting nominee, and for a while was the movie’s only defense against legitimate criticisms about its representational issues. Her hateful tweets withered what goodwill Oscar voters had for that film.
Emilia Pérez even lost in the international film category where it was largely expected to dominate. Instead, Oscar voters showed love to I’m Still Here, an absorbing drama about a family enduring horrific violence at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship during the ’70s. The film also scored a best picture and best actress nomination, the latter for the magnetic performance at its centre from Fernanda Torres, 59, daughter to Brazilian icon Fernanda Montenegro.
A Complete Shutout
Did I forget to mention best picture nominee A Complete Unknown? Well, that’s because James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring It Boy Timothée Chalamet went home empty-handed, failing to cash in on any of its eight nominations.
The shut-out doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Mangold’s movie capturing the folk singer’s early hustle and meteoric rise is a relatively straightforward – and handsomely dull – fable about a mischievously paradoxical figure who never told it – or sang it – straight.
No Other Land Makes Its Mark
One of the most powerful films of the year, No Other Land, picked up an Oscar in the documentary category, despite never finding a distributor willing to release it in the U.S. or Canada. The documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of activists, is an intimate and visceral on-the-ground account of Palestinian families in the West Bank holding strong in the face of military-backed settler violence. The urgent and eye-opening film has nearly swept documentary prizes this awards season, even though it’s only played in festivals and circuit screenings. The industry suppression is growing more galling as awards voters, including the Academy, have been opting to champion the film.
Celebrating the Dearly Departed
As always, the annual In Memoriam montage was stacked with legends of the silver screen, as the Academy paid their respects to the likes of Maggie Smith, Gena Rowlands, Roger Corman, Kris Kristofferson, Donald Sutherland, Louis Gossett Jr., Shelley Duvall, David Lynch and James Earl Jones. Morgan Freeman introduced the montage by honouring two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman, who was suspiciously found dead earlier this week alongside his wife and dog.
Soon after, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey took the stage to celebrate the late Quincy Jones – who helped launch both of their film careers in 1985 when he produced The Color Purple. They introduced Queen Latifah, who led an onstage performance of Ease on Down the Road from The Wiz, the 1978 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz featuring Jones’ music, and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.
The Musical is Staying Alive
The awards show did away with performing nominated songs, but the musical was still alive and well during the ceremony. The evening kicked off with Wicked stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo performing The Wizard of Oz’s Over The Rainbow and The Wiz’s Home. Those duelling numbers, culminating in a duet of Wicked’s Defying Gravity, were ostensibly a tribute to Los Angeles following the wildfires.
Other musical interludes included host Conan O’Brien performing a parody song about how he won’t waste the audience’s time and a tribute to James Bond that was both exhilarating and baffling. The latter featured The Substance star Margaret Qualley doing a tango with dancers dressed like 007, before singers Lisa, Raye and Doja Cat took turns singing iconic Bond songs.
The Bond performance was fun and nostalgic, but audiences were left scratching their heads guessing its purpose. It came off like an In Memoriam montage to the spy franchise, now that longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson ceded creative control over 007 to Amazon MGM Studios. Most in the industry assume without the Broccoli family’s curation, the Bond franchise will now be squeezed for content the way Star Wars has (perhaps a Moneypenny prequel series or an Oddjob spinoff) and lose what made it eventful.
Canadian Tariffs at the Oscars?
With cross-border relations being as fraught as they are, it’s hard not to notice how Canadians were few and far between at this year’s festivities. Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language, a comical, intoxicating and melancholic concoction set in a Winnipeg that’s magically merged with Tehran, just missed out on the international film category after being shortlisted.
Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and his partner Tanya Lapointe were in attendance representing Dune: Part Two, which had five nominations including best picture, cinematography, production design and won for sound and visual effects. As one of Villeneuve’s finest, it deserved more.
Canadian filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie were nominated in the documentary category for Sugarcane. Though the film isn’t officially Canadian because of where its funding came from, it tells a story that hits close to home – taking an intimate and gut-wrenching look at how the community of the Williams Lake reservation in British Columbia processes the discovery of unmarked graves at a nearby residential school.
The only Canadian to actually pick up an Oscar was Samantha Quan, who is a co-producer on best-picture-winner Anora and is married to the filmmaker Sean Baker. “To all the dreamers and young filmmakers out there,” Quan said on stage, “tell the stories you want to tell. Tell the stories that move you. I promise you, you will never regret it.”
RELATED:
Red Carpet Stars: The Best Dressed at the 2025 Oscars
For Your Consideration: ‘The Talent’ Shines a Spotlight on Oscar Campaigns
