Demi Moore Talks Oscars Final Stretch During Pre-Parties

EXCLUSIVE: Shirley MacLaine wailed during her acceptance speech when she won her Oscar back in 1984 for Terms of Endearment, “I’m gonna cry because this show has been as long as my career!”

Spare a thought for three of this year’s Best Actress nominees, Demi Moore, Karla Sofia Gascón and Mickey Madison, because for them, awards season has been running since last May when their movies, The Substance, Emilia Pérez and Anora, respectively, debuted at the Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s been nearly a year,” Moore tells me helpfully, when we meet at the annual Charles Finch/Chanel pre-Oscars soirée in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Her face is a genuine picture of joy, that’s the word. “I am joyful,” she smiles.

“My mind and spirit is great,” Moore continues. “But my body says, ‘F— you.’”

In a phrase, Moore encapsulates a sentiment I’ve been hearing all weekend: It’ll be over by Sunday.

I’m not a man of violence, well, except when I was known as ‘The Tank’ in my rugby-playing days, but I was prepared to sock the awards consultant who ventured to say that the next awards season starts on Monday. Which is tomorrow. Yikes!

Moore has a few days off, then spends the next few months filming the second season of Landman, “then we’ll look and see what else is out there.”

Her eyes light up as The Substance producer Eric Fellner comes into view. “The flowers were lovely,” she cries.

Then Fellner, the Working Title co-chair, shares a few words with Focus Features vice chairman Jason Cassidy about being on an early call today. Whatever it is, it’s all in the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group family. 

Except when it isn’t, which is why MUBI ended up raking in millions at the box-office when they took on The Substance when the UFEG family declined it.

I spot Fernanda Torres, the gracious Best Actress contender and star of Walter Salles’ harrowing I’m Still Here. 

Torres is trapped in the bottleneck behind Mick Jagger who has rolled in with girlfriend Melanie Hamrick and Jagged Films president Victoria Pearman.

Jagger and his party veer to the right and bump into the billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, the co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics, successfully rescue Torres.

Once upon a time, way back in the day, Barker would take me aside on the eve of the Academy Awards, and accurately as it happens, tell me who was going to win the next day.

This year? His money’s on I’m Still Here, certainly in the fascinating Best International Feature category, that includes The Girl With the Needle, Emilia Pérez, The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Flow.

We’ll know in a few hours whether or not the Barker prophecy comes to pass.

However, I may not be polite if one more person asks me what’s gonna win. It could be this, it could be that. I have no clue. Of course, I have my favorites. One of the year’s best pictures, September 5, received just one nomination for original screenplay, so what do I know? 

Although, I do remember thinking after seeing a sneak screening of Edward Berger’s Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, at the Telluride Film Festival, that it would make the running, and it has, so there you go. And I’ve always been a fan of Cynthia Erivo, A Complete Unknown, Nickel Boys, Dune: Part II, and I’ve been known to warble Defying Gravity to my poor dogs. 

Some of my favourites didn’t even get nominated. Danielle Deadwyler, so good in Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson, was shut out of the Best Supporting Actress list. Three years ago, Deadwyler portrayed Mamie Till-Mobley in Till. That performance still haunts me, and it still pains me that the Academy did not recognize her.

Deadwyler was at the Finch/Chanel bash, and every time I looked over, she was deep in conversation with Gayle King, who I did manage to catch up with.

King confirmed that she’s preparing for the Blue Origin space mission. She’s honored to do so, she says, but “terrified.”

“Good for you,” I tell her.

I see my old friend Julian Schnabel. I see The Brutalist’s Felicity Jones, and over there is Adrien Brody deep in conversation with Poker Face star Natasha Lyonne, designer Georgina Chapman and producer Scott Stuber. 

Oh, and “hi,” Nicole Avant, I loved The Six Triple Eight. And “hi,” Michael Keaton, I loved Knox Goes Away, the other thingy, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice wasn’t for me. And Ralph Fiennes, who has been guided through the season principally by Premier PR’s Laura Symons and Relevant’s Nicole Caruso, has been so underrated this season because his formidable portrait in Conclave is the least showy. 

The producer Cassian Elwes is telling me about the Gus Van Sant hostage thriller Dead Man’s Wire that was shooting in Kentucky with Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Carey Elwes and Myha’la. Oscar nominee Colman Domingo’s in it too, as this column was first to report. 

I can also reveal that Danny Elfman will compose the film’s score and that Kelly Lynch is also in the movie, some 36 years after she starred with Matt Dillon in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy. 

Lynch and Al Pacino play husband and wife, the parents of Montgomery’s character, who’s being held hostage.

Pacino agreed to be in the movie only if his scenes could be shot in Los Angeles. This came to pass, and Pacino was filmed, Elwes tells me, at the Beverly Estate, also known as the Hearst Estate. 

You movie buffs out there have already joined the dots. That’s the place where Francis Ford Coppola shot the severed horse head scene in The Godfather.

I love the history of movies and how moments creep up on you in unexpected ways. 

A few days ago, I rewatched Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Ellen Burstyn, for no reason other than I wanted to. I’d completely forgotten that Harvey Keitel is featured in it too. The first person I spot in the Polo Lounge, after the Mariachi band that greets guests, is Keitel. The shame of it is that I got distracted and all night long I wasn’t able to make my way to say hello to Keitel.  I mean, I’ve interviewed him a couple of times over the years, but I had a pressing desire to speak to him. I first saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 50 years ago. I was a kid. I was ‘The Tank’. And there’s Keitel in the same room.

As I’m writing this, I see a snippy comment from a friend on the East coast, who has been following Oscar eve progress on various socials. The parties look lame, they say. 

Here’s the thing: I don’t actually like parties until I get to them. There’s no such thing as a lame party.

I got to have a conversation with Stephen Schwartz, the composer and lyricist of Wicked at the Universal party, and neither of us could fathom why director Jon M. Chu has been shut out all season, aside from the Critics Choice Awards. 

Schwartz and I talked a lot about politics, and believe me, Wicked meets our historical moment more than most other movies. “Wait till you see Wicked: For Good,” he says. 

On Friday, I stopped by a reception hosted by German Films at the W Hollywood to celebrate the German films and nominees. Edward Berger’s Conclave, for one. Lisy Christl the film’s costume designer was in attendance with composer Volker Bertelmann, and Brit screenwriter Peter Straughan. They had to scoot away pretty quickly.

But I enjoyed catching up with September 5 director Tim Fehlbaum, who’s nominated for original screenplay with writer Moritz Binder and Alex David.

They were with Philipp Trauer and Thomas Wöbk, two of the movie’s producers. 

Binder’s at work on other projects but he tells me that “the team is actively looking to reunite for another film for Tim to direct” following the success of September 5 that started in “a sidebar of a sidebar” at last year’s Venice Film Festival before Republic Pictures and Paramount took it to Telluride.

Then I was introduced to Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, who play the siblings at the heat of Mohammad Rasoulof’s great film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, about the political upheaval in Iran. I saw the film at Cannes but never fully realized the peril involved in its making. Rasoulof managed to get his reels to Berlin where the picture was edited by Andrew Bird, a Brit who has long resided there.

Rostami says, through an interpreter, that when she made the film, she “reached a certain freedom” and “realized that I don’t want to give up this freedom. So, it was important to me, as an artist and as an actress, to have the freedom for the artist.”

That realization meant that she had to leave the country of her birth and make her way to Germany where she has resided for the past several months.

She and Maleki share an apartment in Berlin.

It’s difficult for them to know if they can ever return to Iran.

“I don’t have even my country’s passport, how can I return? They took it from me,” Maleki shrugs.

“Right now,” she tells me in English, “I have papers because I didn’t have anything. And then… I left Iran illegally, I went to a neighbor country and then from the neighbor country, I went to the France embassy and at the embassy they gave me a travel document because the movie was in the Cannes Festival, so I could go to France. And then I went to Germany and then I requested for having some German travel document. After months, they gave me travel document and that’s why I could come here.”

And that, I realize, is the point of the Academy Awards.

The awards put a spotlight not just on popular Hollywood motion pictures, but also on movies like The Seed of the Sacred Fig  and I’m Still Here, shot in countries where freedom isn’t always a given.

And think about Emilia Peréz too. Step away from all the darn noise and consider the film as a piece of art. You don’t have to like it. But stand back and explore it from all sides; all its contours.

And remember that you have the freedom to do that.