Demi Moore and 6 Best Actress Narratives to Watch
The comeback, the overdue vet, the discovery: the stories that could power Moore, Adams, Jolie, Kidman and others to a nomination
Before we get into today’s best actress handicapping, it feels wrong not to acknowledge the passing of one of the great winners. Maggie Smith won best actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970 as well as best supporting actress for California Suite in 1979, though she’s iconic to a whole other generation as the Harry Potter franchise’s Professor McGonagall and Downton Abbey’s Dowager Countess. She died this week at the age of 89, and her legacy, it goes without saying, is immense.
Winning an Oscar is no guarantee of future success in Hollywood. Just ask Elisabeth Sparkle, the character Demi Moore plays in The Substance. We only learn that Elisabeth is an Oscar winner because her employer, played by Dennis Quaid, mentions it dismissively in a phone call Elisabeth wasn’t supposed to overhear. Now older than 50 and with her most prestigious work behind her, Elisabeth is being fired from her workout show to make room for a younger model.
What happens from there, as Elisabeth experiments with a risky treatment called The Substance to create a younger version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley), is wilder and grosser than you can possibly imagine. Now in theaters and doing fairly good business, The Substance is the most acclaimed work Moore has done quite possibly since A Few Good Men. In its frank reckoning with Hollywood’s beauty standards and disdain for older women, it’s prompting an overdue reconsideration of Moore’s career and incredible pop culture influence.
With all of that, naturally, comes Oscar buzz. The Substance, which won a best screenplay prize at Cannes and has exceptional makeup effects that ought to merit strong consideration in that race, is not going to be a movie for everybody, and it’s possible to imagine some awards voters being turned off by it entirely. But Moore, one of the biggest and most iconic stars of the '90s, carries her own gravitas, and can be a strong contender even in a best actress race that’s shaping up to be one of the most competitive in years.
Any successful Oscar campaign needs a good narrative, and Moore has that in spades, from her comeback story to her status as an icon overdue for her first nomination. Then again, so does everybody else she’s competing against.
Today I’m breaking down the best actress race into the most common narratives we see in acting campaigns and which contenders this year fit into each. There’s a lot of campaign left, of course, and some of these narratives will shift and expand as the season continues. But for now, here’s the story everybody is telling — and who might have the power to tell it best.
The Comeback Success
The comeback story is the most powerful narrative Moore has going for her at the moment, and she’s got a very recent playbook to follow. Though Brendan Fraser was never as huge a star as Moore was, he was a similarly populist success in the '90s and 2000s, far more famous for such action roles as The Mummy than more challenging work like Gods and Monsters.
Like Moore, Fraser stepped back from high-profile film roles for a while, and was open about the physical and mental challenges of stardom that he was still recovering from. All of it led to a swell of support for his performance in The Whale, and a best actor speech in which he thanked his studio A24 “for making such a bold film” and director Darren Aronofsky for “throwing me a creative lifeline.”
Moore, who has not been top-billed in a film in more than a decade, could give a speech saying almost exactly the same of The Substance distributor Mubi and director Coralie Forgeat. For all the formidable competition in the best actress race this year, nobody has quite a comeback narrative like Moore does. The closest may be Amy Adams, whose nomination for Nightbitch could be her first in lead actress since 2016’s shocking Arrival snub.
But Adams’ Oscar narrative fits more neatly into another archetype we see each year, and where there are already a few contenders.
The Overdue Veteran
In recent years, Glenn Close has come to embody this archetype, an actress whose celebrated career and excellent work has somehow not received the Oscar recognition it deserves. (This isn’t exclusively the domain of actresses: just ask recent winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Gary Oldman.)
Adams, Close’s Hillbilly Elegy co-star (not that either of them is eager to be reminded of that), only has six Oscar nominations to Close’s eight but really ought to have an Oscar by now. Her bold, often deeply unglamorous work in Nightbitch — so different from her breakthrough performances in Junebug and Enchanted, or even her polished turns in The Master and Vice — feels well-suited for at least another nomination, though Nightbitch will first have to move past some mixed responses from TIFF.
There’s not quite as much attention around Saoirse Ronan’s nominations streak, but at just 30, she has already been nominated four times, most recently for Little Women. She’s in the mix for two films this year: in lead actress for the gritty, heartfelt addiction recovery indie The Outrun, and in supporting for Steve McQueen’s World War II saga Blitz.
Ronan could become the youngest actor ever nominated in both categories, but that may be getting ahead of ourselves. The Outrun, which debuted to warm reviews at Sundance, will have to find a way to stand out in the crowded fall season, while Blitz remains a bit of an unknown quantity until its London Film Festival premiere in early October.
So that’s the state of play for actresses nominated multiple times who have never won. But what if you’ve already got an Oscar and you come back for more?
The Oscar Winners Back for Another Round
You might think that already having an Oscar would make someone a less compelling figure to vote for, but lately the Academy has been all about the return favorites: Emma Stone and Frances McDormand have both won their second (and in McDormand’s case, a third) best actress victories in the past five years, and Renee Zellweger picked up an actress trophy to match her supporting one. Could this year’s winner be yet another repeat?
Let’s start with the film that has two Oscar winners going head-to-head — Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door — which will be submitting both Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in lead actress. The two-hander melodrama, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, arrives at a moment when Almodóvar’s films have found new recognition within the Academy; his last two features, Parallel Mothers and Pain & Glory, both earned nominations for his longtime collaborators Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas. But pulling off two nominations in a single category may be a much bigger challenge.
Angelina Jolie, meanwhile, has the title role and most of the focus in Maria, the Pablo Larrain-directed biopic of Maria Callas that debuted at Venice and has since been picked up by Netflix. Jolie has a bit of a comeback narrative of her own, despite an Oscar and decades of immense stardom; she’s only made a handful of films in the past decade, and emerging from her brutal years-long divorce from Brad Pitt with an Oscar campaign could be a powerful story — if she wants to tell it, that is.
Finally there’s Nicole Kidman, who’s being praised for some of the most fearless work of a very fearless career in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, which I caught in Toronto and which opens in theaters Christmas Day. For all of the effort Kidman has put into working with bold, ambitious filmmakers — her laundry list of director names during her AFI Tribute went viral for a reason — her Oscar nominations have rarely reflected that, instead leaning toward her more mainstream work like Being the Ricardos and Lion. But now that we’ve got an Academy that can honor Jonathan Glazer, who directed Kidman in Birth before The Zone of Interest, can Kidman’s boldest side find Oscar success as well?
The Star is Born
Almost every year, the best actress lineup includes someone who has been nominated before; almost every year it also includes not only a first-time nominee, but someone who was largely unknown to most voters a year earlier. In recent years, Lily Gladstone, Ana de Armas, Andra Day and Cynthia Erivo have all had their breakthrough best actress moments.
This year will likely be no different. Mikey Madison has already had a role in a best picture nominee — she was very memorably set on fire during the climax of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — but she’s still a very fresh face in Anora, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner that’s still out there building buzz on the fall festival circuit. The 25-year-old blazes through Anora as the titular sex worker caught up with the son of a Russian oligarch; she’s surrounded by men with varying degrees of bad intentions throughout the film, but holds her own in hilarious, compelling fashion.
Madison’s breakthrough moment came during Anora’s premiere at Cannes, which is also where Karla Sofia Gascón was stepping into the biggest spotlight of her career. As she told me on last week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, she’s confident she does her best work ever as the former drug lord at the center of Emilia Pérez, who attempts to reconnect with her family even after transitioning to living as a woman. She would be the first openly trans actress ever nominated for an Oscar, which puts more weight on her than any other contender out there. But it’s a pressure she seems to be welcoming as she makes her way toward history.
The Stars of the Little Indies That Could
Many of the films I’ve mentioned already are indies, of course — it’s hard to have any kind of Oscar race without them. But two potential best actress contenders come from movies that are even smaller than average, and will likely use every bit of hustle they can to keep their stars in the conversation.
I’m feeling particularly bullish about Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose ferocious lead performance in Hard Truths was endlessly buzzed about in Toronto. She’s been nominated before for a collaboration with director Mike Leigh, for 1996’s Secrets and Lies, and Leigh himself has been nominated seven times: He’s clearly in the club. With the fairly small Bleecker Street distributing, Hard Truths may not be able to follow the same lavish promotional paths as its competitors. But there’s real passion out there for Jean-Baptiste’s performance; all it would take is one high-profile critics prize to make her feel like an undeniable nominee.
I’m also rooting hard for June Squibb and her film Thelma, which opened this summer from another small distributor, Magnolia Pictures, and became a surprise, small-scale hit. Squibb was 84 when she earned her first Oscar nomination for her scene-stealing turn in Nebraska; she will be 95 by the time of next year’s Oscars, and could become the only nonagenarian acting nominee in history. It’s about more than age, though. Squibb is terrific in the movie, spry and funny but also finding great depth in the story of a woman with a lot left to do before the end. Squibb is a bit of a breakout star and an overdue veteran, too — the full package for a well-deserved nomination.
One Last Thing: The Frances Fisher Effect
In the years since the scandal around To Leslie and its aggressive campaign tactics, awards obsessives have continued to be fascinated by Frances Fisher. The actress (you know her from Unforgiven and Titanic) and extremely well-connected Hollywood figure was a key player in the To Leslie campaign, and even after Academy campaign rules were changed to clarify how supporters like Fisher can use social media to promote certain films, Fisher kept at it. Last January, she threw her support behind Ava DuVernay and her film Origin, though that time it wasn’t enough to break into the race.
So far this season she’s only posted about Sing Sing, but eagle-eyed Fisher obsessives noticed her at the premiere of The Substance. She and Moore worked together on Striptease in the '90s, and it’s not at all hard to imagine Fisher’s network of prominent Hollywood women putting everything they’ve got behind Moore. Frances, if you’re reading this and want to share your secrets, I am all ears.