Demi Moore deserved an Oscar, but it’s no surprise she didn’t win

It’s common knowledge that the Academy isn’t in the habit of awarding horror movies. This fact alone should serve as explanation for Demi Moore’s lack of a Best Actress Oscar for The Substance at the 97th Academy Awards. But her surprising strength in the award circuit leading up to the Academy’s big night — winning the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Award, the Saturn Award, and most importantly the Screen Actor’s Guild award — seemed to suggest she might be one of the few actors to overcome the Oscar’s distaste for horror. However, if you dive a little deeper into the history of horror at the Oscars, you’ll quickly find that Moore’s had more to overcome than the larger genre bias when it came to The Substance. 

While horror movies are seldom seen anywhere on the Oscars telecast, the big categories — picture, director, acting, and writing — are the ones the genre is most often shut out of. As such, it’s always notable when winners pop up. The Silence of the Lambs, of course, swept 1992’s biggest categories, and Kathy Bates won Best Actress for Misery back in 1991. And that’s about it for acting winners in horror movies over the last several decades. 

But what do all those winners, and most of the nominees, have in common that Demi Moore doesn’t? They’re all non-supernatural horror movies. Given the fact that there are more micro-divisions in horror than any other genre, it’s no surprise that even the Oscars would have their favorites — and that their favorites would be the horror movies closest to bread-and-butter dramas. If you’re willing to go a bit further back in time, you can find a Supporting Actress win for Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby in 1969, and a Best Actor win for Fredric March’s work in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all the way back in 1932. But it’s fair to say that more recently, the Academy has mostly focused on the most realistic and grounded scary movies, even if calling Silence of the Lambs realistic might be a bit of a stretch. 

But The Substance defies all that precedent. It’s significantly less stayed and stately than those older horror performance winners, and clearly not as grounded as the more recent winners. The movie around Moore is bombastic and bizarre. It’s exactly the kind of movie the Academy normally doesn’t give the time of day. So what made it seem like The Substance could be such an outlier, and win recognition from the Academy when other horror movies like it haven’t? I think the answer is in the question: Demi Moore herself. 

Despite how wild The Substance is, particularly its last act, Moore’s performance is remarkably grounded. She never feels out of place in the movie’s amplified, borderline silly world, but at the same time she’s giving a deeply felt performance that feels nuanced, grounded, and lived in. It’s the perfect kind of performance to lure us in and make the film’s outrageous final act land, and the fact that for most of the film it feels so unlike many other supernatural horror performances is probably the exact reason it resonated so deeply with the members of other awards bodies like SAG. 

None of this is to say that the performance that did get awarded last night is anything other than deserving. It’s always fun to see a fresh young actor awarded at the Oscars, let alone an actor who turned in a performance as lived in and fun as Mikey Madison’s in Anora. But Moore winning, as unlikely as it clearly always was, would have felt like a sign of a possible larger sea change in the way the Academy views horror movies. It could have given us a bit of hope that performances like Nell Tiger Free’s in First Omen, or Lily-Rose Depp’s in Nosferatu, might soon at least be part of the awards conversation. Instead, Moore took home nothing, and the larger aspirations for horror Oscars will have to wait at least one more year.