LOS ANGELES: Demi Moore won best actress at the Critics Choice Awards on Friday, confirming her status as favourite for the Oscars in a week that saw scandal envelop her Emilia Perez rival Karla Sofia Gascon.

Nineties megastar Moore’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 in January, and puts her on track to cap a remarkable career renaissance at next month’s Oscars. “This has been such a wild ride,” said Moore, 62, 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 aging celebrity who injects a serum to temporarily live again in her younger body.

Nodding 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.” Moore’s win came at the expense of Gascon, the Spanish transgender star of narco-musical Emilia Perez whose Oscar campaign collapsed in spectacular fashion over the past week.

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

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2025