Actress Demi Moore wins at Critics Choice with disgraced rival Karla Sofia Gascon absent

LOS ANGELES – Demi Moore won the Best Actress prize at the Critics Choice Awards on Feb 7, confirming her status as favourite for the Oscars in a week that saw scandal envelop her Emilia Perez rival Karla Sofia Gascon.

The American star’s horror film The Substance also won Best Original Screenplay at a glitzy Los Angeles gala held by North America’s largest critics’ group, which crowned Anora as the year’s Best Picture.

Moore’s win follows her victory at the Golden Globes on Jan 5, and puts the 62-year-old on track to cap a remarkable career renaissance at the Oscars on March 2.

“This has been such a wild ride,” said Moore, who made a string of hit films in the 1990s, but came to be known as much for her love life as her acting in subsequent decades.

That has changed with The Substance, a body-horror flick about an ageing celebrity, played by Moore, who injects a serum to temporarily live again in her younger body, portrayed by American actress Margaret Qualley.

In a nod to the film’s frequently bloody and horrifying depictions of warped bodies, Moore thanked critics for rewarding “this genre of horror films, that are overlooked and not seen for the profundity that they can hold”.

Her win came at the expense of Gascon, the Spanish transgender star of narco-musical Emilia Perez, whose Oscar campaign collapsed spectacularly over the past week.

Social media messages posted years ago by Gascon – in which she made derogatory and racist remarks about Muslims, China and even the Oscars themselves – had resurfaced.

The film’s distributor Netflix has since dropped the 52-year-old from its Oscars campaign, and Emilia Perez director Jacques Audiard disavowed his lead actress for her “absolutely hateful” and “inexcusable” comments.

Gascon was notably absent at the Critics Choice Awards, and when her name was read out among the nominees, the usually celebratory Hollywood audience fell conspicuously silent.

Moore did name-check Gascon while thanking her fellow nominees during her acceptance speech. But neither Audiard, whose film won Best Foreign Language Film, nor Zoe Saldana, who won Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Perez, mentioned Gascon in their remarks from the stage.

A Netflix representative told AFP it hoped “the actions of one person” would not “affect the whole film”, which is still in the running to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

That race, for the most coveted Academy Award, is unusually wide open in 2025.

The ceremony on Feb 7 provided a major boost for Anora, the Cannes festival Palme d’Or winner. The film is about a young New York stripper, played by American actress Mikey Madison, who marries a Russian billionaire’s young son, portrayed by Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn, in an ill-fated whirlwind romance.

Several other contenders also picked up key wins on Feb 7.

The Brutalist star Adrien Brody won Best Actor, papal selection drama Conclave won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Acting Ensemble, and Broadway adaptation Wicked earned Best Director for Jon M. Chu. AFP