Prior to the Academy Awards, Demi Moore was considered a frontrunner for Best Actress. Her performance in the body horror film *The Substance*, where she played an aging actress who uses a black-market drug to regain her youth and beauty, had already earned her awards at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
However, she lost the Oscar to Mikey Madison, the 25-year-old star of *[Film Title]*.
Many social media users pointed out the apparent parallels between the outcome and the themes of Moore’s movie.
One popular X post read, “Wow, Demi Moore losing to a younger, brighter star… someone should make a movie about this.”
ESPN’s Paolo Uggetti wrote, “Demi Moore losing to Mikey Madison is essentially the plot of *The Substance*.” TV personality Roxy Striar echoed this sentiment, stating, “Mikey Madison was fantastic, but her win over Demi Moore feels like the plot of *The Substance*.”
Vulture writer E. Alex Jung commented that “Mikey Madison winning is very pro-*Substance*, if you think about it.” Similarly, writer and podcaster Joan Summers posted: “I’m not pitting women against each other, I’m a working writer, not a stan. Mikey winning Best Actress is such an interesting way to conclude the Demi Moore press cycle for *The Substance*. Life imitates art, etc.”
Despite many fans’ disappointment that Moore, whose decades of work have been reduced to “” acting, remains without an Oscar, she told [Outlet Name] that she isn’t overly concerned with awards. “Whatever happens, I just keep focusing on remembering not to make it mean too much, but also not to make it mean too little,” she said. “But I can enjoy all of it.”
She also mentioned in the same interview that she was drawn to the role because of its resonance with her own career, noting, “Women being marginalized at a certain age, particularly in the entertainment industry, is the least-new information of the entire movie.”