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1 year ago
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In a night of fairly predictable wins, the biggest surprise of the 2025 Oscars was perhaps when Mikey Madison won the award for Best Actress for her performance in Anora, beating out Demi Moore for The Substance.
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Mikey and Demi were undoubtedly the two front-runners in the Best Actress race, having both won major awards in the lead-up to the Oscars. But, as the big night drew closer, the general sense was that Demi would be the one to take home the Academy Award, marking the culmination of her long and turbulent Hollywood career.
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So, after Mikey emerged triumphant on March 2, becoming one of the youngest Best Actress Oscar winners in history, fans online were divided. Despite all the love for Mikey and Anora, many felt that Demi was perhaps more deserving of the win after giving such a career-defining performance in The Substance — a movie that, ironically, focuses on the pressures of aging in Hollywood.
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Earlier this month, in an interview with Time magazine for its Time100 issue, Demi shared her honest reaction to the loss, admitting that she had a feeling the award would go to Mikey on the night. “I leaned over and whispered to my manager, ‘I think it’s going to Mikey.’ I don’t know why I knew, but I did,” she said, adding that she felt “so centered and calm” when her name wasn’t called out. “I didn’t feel gutted… I just trusted, and am in trust of, whatever is going to unfold.”
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Now, Demi has answers for the people who feel she was snubbed. During a conversation at the Time100 summit in New York on Wednesday, she was asked about the widespread sentiment that she “should have won the Oscar” and whether she can see herself returning to the Academy Awards in the future.
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“I think that would be nice. I can’t say I’d be mad at it,” she said jokingly about the prospect of winning an Oscar at some point. “The question of ‘Should I have won?’ is certainly not the perspective of how I hold it. Because I didn’t [win]. And I really do subscribe to this idea that everything in life is happening for me, not to me.”
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“That doesn’t mean there isn’t disappointment, pain, or that things go the way I would like. 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 continued. “And in that moment, it was being projected that I would win, and so, of course, there’s disappointment. I also immediately recognized that there is something that is greater that I am to be in service to — even if I don’t know what that is.”
Jemal Countess / Getty Images for TIME
Despite her complicated feelings, Demi has shown nothing but love for Mikey, whom she said she “had the pleasure of getting to know” during the 2025 awards season. “She did an incredible performance, and really, it’s an odd thing for there to be a competition anyway,” Demi said.
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The 62-year-old star also admitted that the Oscar win would’ve been the perfect “completion” to her journey with The Substance, but now feels “there’s more work to be done. This issue is not complete.” “I’m sorry to everyone who had hopes for me that was also the hopes for themselves, because I did feel a lot of collective disappointment that felt like it was even bigger than me,” she concluded.
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