Why The Substance Will Win Best Picture
'Tis 10 days until the Oscars, and no less than 10 films are ramping up their campaigns in a last-minute push for the top prize of them all, Best Picture. This also appears to be a far more competitive race than in years past, which has often spat out at best two-horse races (like The Power of the Dog vs. CODA in 2022, or 1917 vs. Parasite in 2020), but more often a runaway coronation (as we've had in the last two years, with Oppenheimer and Everything Everywhere All At Once).
No, this one genuinely feels wide open in large part because of how many new names are up for the big awards. For the first time in history, the 5 Best Director nominees at these Oscars are all first-time nominees. Only 1 out of the combined Best Actor and Best Actress nominees has ever won an Oscar, and only 4 of them have even been nominated before. But it's not just the absence of bona fide star power helming the nominated movies; it's the fact that there isn't a traditional frontrunner, as a small handful of films have split honors across the awards circuit thus far.
Those facts, as well as the Oscars' less predictable preferential voting system means that no nominee can truly be counted out of the race. Spotlight's and Moonlight's back-to-back upsets in 2016 and 2017, Parasite's stunner in 2020, and CODA's late surge in 2022 all taught us to expect the unexpected, so we're here to give fans of all 10 nominees reason to believe on Sunday the 2nd.
The Substance is a body horror film about an aging celebrity who takes a black market substance to birth a second, younger body that she can use only on alternating weeks. It's written and directed by a relatively unknown French woman, stars Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid, and is also a social satire that uses grotesque imagery and sound. So in other words, just your classic Oscar bait.
No, we quite possibly have never seen any Best Picture nominee even like The Substance before. And that's been a lot of its appeal; it truly is unlike any movie most of us have seen, and unsurprisingly, that has led it to be abuzz in online film circles ever since its Best Screenplay win at the Cannes Film Festival. It had a meager showing at the box office, but that has only lent to its underdog story: a niche body horror comedy, released exclusively through Mubi, not even landing in the box office Top 5 in its opening weekend, going all the way to mainstay on the awards circuit....it's hard not to see the Cinderella appeal.
And mainstay on the awards circuit it has been; after the Screenplay win at Cannes, it earned Best Picture nominations at the Globes, the Satellite Awards, the Critics' Choice, and the Independent Spirit Awards, and its directors and two main actresses have been present at even more. Coralie Fargeaut, the aforementioned director, is among the five first-timers in the Best Director Oscar field, not a small feat given the awards' troubling history with nominating female directors. But the biggest argument for The Substance's chances to win it all is on the back of its star Demi Moore. 3 of the last 4 Best Picture winners, after all, have doubled up with a Best Actor or Actress win (Cillian Murphy last year, Michelle Yeoh the year before that, and Frances McDormand in 2021). This year, industry vet Moore is the favorite to take Best Acress-- albeit in a highly competitive race --having already taken home the Golden Globe and Critics' Choice equivalent, and also being nominated at the SAG Awards this weekend.
Don't think that there's not an argument to be derived from, well, the substance, either. As much as its body horror might turn a lot of voters off, nobody can deny how unique and original The Substance is. We shouldn't rule out the appeal of voting for a nominee being wildly unlike any Best Picture winner before it, especially when we are just two yers removed from the crown going to Everything Everywhere All At Once. Furthermore, I've already made this argument with the first Best Picture preview, and chances are I'll make it again: we don't know how the political climate will shape these Oscars, if at all. But the movie's discussion of women's image in the male gaze might feel especially poignant to some Academy voters, as we're just months removed from toxic masculinity rearing its ugly head in the Presidential election.
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