The nominee for her work in The Substance takes nothing away from this year’s Best Actress winner Mikey Madison, who won for Anora.
“Should I have won?” Demi Moore mused at the Time100 Summit about her loss at this year’s Oscars ceremony. It’s certainly a question many critics and fans have been asking since her surprise loss to Mikey Madison for her role in Anora.
The Substance star was asked if she can see a return to the Academy Awards stage at the summit, as covered by Variety, and joked, “That would be nice. I can’t say that I’d be mad at it.”
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But when it comes to the question of “should,” she said that’s “not the perspective of how I hold it. Because I didn’t [win].”
She went on to explain, “I really do subscribe to this idea that everything in life is happening for me, not to me.”
Despite having a larger perspective on her remarkable awards season run, Moore did have to acknowledge there were real feelings, and some of those feelings did hurt.
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t disappointment, pain, or that things [didn’t] go the way I would like,” she admitted. “But when I look at it through that lens, it allows me to step back and say, ‘What is this trying to give me?’”
She went into the night as the presumed front-runner for the Oscar after picking up a Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award on her way to Hollywood’s biggest night. Her loss is considered by many the biggest shock and upset of the night.
“Of course there’s disappointment,” Moore said of the loss. “I also immediately recognize that there is something that is greater that I am to be in service to, even if I don’t know what that is.”
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She also doesn’t want to let her feelings take anything away from this year’s winner. “I had the pleasure of getting to know Mikey Madison and think she did an incredible performance,” she said, before adding, “It’s an odd thing for there to be a competition anyway.”
While there are obviously winners, there aren’t really any losers in this kind of competition. After all, the basis of qualifying as a nominee is you have to have already turned in one of the best performances of the year, as agreed upon by the experts and your peers.
And while things didn’t go the way Moore — or her fans — might have hoped, she doesn’t see this loss as the end of a journey in any way. “The message is that there’s more work to be done,” she said. “This issue is not complete.”
And to those fans, the star apologized “to everyone who had hopes for me, because I did feel a lot of collective disappointment that felt like it was even bigger than me.”
The good news is she’s nowhere near done. Moore’s next project is the film I Love Boosters, where she’ll star alongside Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and LaKeith Stanfield. And you can bet this Oscar nominee will be in the conversation all over again.
