Exploring The Substance Of Demi Moore’s Film Career
A decades-long snub ends.
The 2025 Academy Award nominations were announced on Thursday, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Emilia Pérez sweeps the night. Don’t worry. I only just heard about Emilia Pérez, as well, but apparently it’s a Netflix musical about a trans drug lord in Mexico. That seems like weapons-grade Hollywood resistance to the second Trump administration. I presume GOP House Rep. Nancy Mace is already protesting Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s Best Actress nomination.
Or they could give all the awards to Wicked, which has 10 nominations to Emilia Pérez’s 13. Director Jon Chu’s adaptation of a George W. Bush-era musical has quite a lot to say about our current political climate. (I know art is subjective, but any interpretation that suggests Elphaba is a poor, ostracized Donald Trump supporter in a phony liberal world is objectively wrong. )
Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are up for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. I’m obviously a hard lock for Grande, but Erivo is competing against Demi Moore, who was nominated for her literally gut-wrenching performance in The Substance. So I’m torn — if I were an actual Academy voter, I’d probably just rely on my wife’s picks, like I do with all the Oregon judges and ballot measures. (The trick is to give her a back massage like a doting husband while looking over her shoulder as she fills out the ballot.)
Erivo has two previous nominations (Best Actress and Best Original Song for 2019’s Harriet), but this is Moore’s first Academy Award nomination ever. Demi Moore was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1990s before her career stalled in the latter half of the decade. So, I must push back against any comeback narrative that suggests Moore was an attractive flash-in-pan who never deserved Oscar recognition until now. Moore took roles that challenged herself and her professional image.
Let’s start with Ghost in 1990. She was nominated for a Golden Globe, but her co-star Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress. That category was filled with some of my favorite performances, though: Diane Ladd (Wild at Heart), Lorraine Bracco (Goodfellas), Annette Bening (The Grifters), and Mary McDonnell (Dances with Wolves) — OK, that last one seems an obvious swap out in retrospect.
Moore’s performance in this scene can bring a grown man to tears … so I hear. (Watch below.)
I also enjoyed Moore in the Alan Rudolph film Mortal Thoughts (1991), which featured her then-husband Bruce Willis. No one deserved any awards for The Butcher’s Wife, but I appreciate that Moore stretched herself, even with an absurd North Carolina accent.
Moore was shamefully overlooked in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992). The Aaron Sorkin script centers around the typical Aaron Sorkin male hero (Tom Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee), but Moore transcends the trappings of an Aaron Sorkin female lead. She’s never not interesting to watch, even when a scene’s focus is on other characters. That’s not easy. There’s a key moment where Galloway suffers a humiliating defeat and Lt. Weinberg (Kevin Pollack) hammers her. She takes her lumps — you can almost see the rhetorical hits land — before stating her world view with such moral confidence Weinberg can only retreat. (Watch below.)
Moore received a Golden Raspberry nomination for her performance in 1993’s Indecent Proposal, which I think was unfair. There was a somewhat puritanical backlash to the movie that nonetheless made $267 million (about $581 million today). Indecent Proposal arguably confronts similar issues as The Substance. It’s certainly more complex than people assumed, and I think many of its critics from the left never actually saw the film. It neither glorifies nor condemns sex work.
In 1990’s Pretty Woman, a sex worker is seemingly “rescued” from her occupation and provided every material comfort through “pure” love. Moore’s Indecent Proposal character is desperate and trades her body for wealth. She doesn’t kill anyone. She chooses to have sex with an attractive man. (That was another criticism that misses the point, I think, as I recall one critic saying they should’ve cast Danny DeVito as the indecent proposer instead of Robert Redford, but this suggests that someone should always feel physically repulsed when they have sex for money.)
Next came 1994’s Disclosure, and Moore as Meredith Johnson was white male Boomers’ fears and anxieties made flesh. Disclosure is a film about sexual harassment where Moore’s the harasser and Gordon Gekko himself, Michael Douglas, is the victim. The idea was that the gender flip would make audiences realize that sexual harassment is about power and not sex. Instead, it just made audiences think they were watching a sequel to Fatal Attraction, where Douglas was also the victim of a woman’s crazed sexual obsession. Like Glenn Close, though, Moore invests her character with more humanity than is written on the page itself.
Meredith outright assaults Douglas’s character in a disturbing scene that further promotes male paranoia rather than fostering empathy for women in the workplace. The film’s regressive plot is eerily prescient: Meredith is an incompetent diversity hire who weaponizes feminism against innocent men. Yet, male actors have mustached-twirled their way to Academy Award nominations.
The film tends to get bored with sexual harassment as an actual topic and wanders off into a weird plot line about CD-ROMs and virtual reality that’s as dated as the sexual politics.
Just five years after Ghost, Moore’s career began a steep decline. It didn’t help that she starred in 1995’s disastrous “adaptation” of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter . You can watch the movie free on YouTube, but I think the price is too high.
Critics started to sour on Moore around the same time that she became the highest-paid film actress. That’s probably not a coincidence. The knives were already out when she was paid $12.5 million for 1996’s Striptease. (Jim Carrey made $20 million the same year for The Cable Guy.)
Moore received the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress in Striptease, which also “won” Worst Picture. She put a lot of work into the role — not just physically, but that’s what critics focused on, along with her paycheck. The L.A. Times assumed it was clever with the headline, “‘Striptease’ is surely Moore’s fittest hour.”
G.I. Jane is perhaps best remembered as the punchline for Chris Rock’s slap-inducing joke at the 2022 Oscars, but Moore has long considered the 1997 film her greatest professional achievement prior to The Substance.
After an extended break, Moore delivered a fun villainous performance in Charlie’s Angel: Full Throttle. Male critics seemed way too surprised that the then-40-year-old wasn’t totally decrepit. That’s what makes The Substance feel more like a tragic documentary than a horror film. The Academy might’ve finally recognized Demi Moore, but they’re late to the party.
Thanks for pointing out her earlier successes Stephen, I unfortunately immediately associate her with the later film disasters. I remember one of my companions at the time in the theater referring to her (highest paid actress) Demi Moore = 50% Bonus.
This is a really cool post and I agree.