Demi Moore is inching closer to winning an Oscar after picking up best actress honors at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards for her performance in “The Substance.” Moore won the prize over fellow nominees Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”), Karla Sofía Gascón (“Emilia Pérez”), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Hard Truths”) Angelina Jolie (“Maria”) and Mikey Madison (“Anora”).
“This is so far beyond anything I could have hoped for. I just want to say, the very recognition — not just for me, but for what this film is about, what it’s trying to convey — your acknowledgment is almost like the elixir. It is the healing balm to the very issue the film brings forward,” Moore said on stage. “I am so grateful, not just for my performance, but that you have highlighted this film, this genre. Normally, horror films are overlooked and not seen for the profundity that they can hold.”
Moore has emerged as an Oscar frontrunner for “The Substance.” She stars as Elizabeth Sparkle, a once-popular actor and TV fitness icon who decides to inject herself with an experimental serum in order to prevent her star from further fading. Before the Oscars ceremony in March, Moore is also up for best actress at the BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Her path to the Oscars got a significant boost at the Golden Globes, where she not only won but also delivered an impassioned speech about what it’s like to receive awards recognition for the first time in her decades-spanning career.
“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me I was a popcorn actress,” Moore said in her sppech. “At that time, I made that mean that this is not something I was allowed to have. That I could do movies that were successful and made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. I bought in, and I believed that. That corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it. Maybe I had done what I was supposed to do.”
Moore credited “The Substance” with being a sign that “you are not done” in this business.
