With Adrien Brody winning Best Actor, Kieran Culkin getting the nod for Supporting Actor, and Anora wrapping up Best Picture as expected, there wasn’t too much suspense at the Oscars Sunday night.
The exception was the Best Actress category, where 25-year-old newcomer Mikey Madison won for her portrayal of a sex worker in Anora over Demi Moore for her dramatic turn in The Substance. Moore played an aging actress dealing with unrealistic beauty standards in Hollywood, which some suggested had troubling parallels to her own career.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Link Lauren and Christian Toto to discuss the unfair expectations women deal with in Hollywood and beyond.
Hollywood Hypocrisy
There has been plenty made of Moore’s appearance over the years as the 62 year old has been accused of altering her face with filler and the like. Her look seemed to moderate more recently, and plenty of headlines suggested Moore was ‘turning back the clock’ or ‘aging in reverse’ during her press tour for The Substance.
Her appearance was once again under scrutiny, however, at the Academy Awards. “I was a little disappointed that Mikey Madison won and beat out Demi Moore,” Lauren said. “My one piece of advice to Demi Moore is: You look beautiful, and I know your name is Demi Moore but you need to be doing Demi-less cheek filler.”
Megyn agreed. “I saw the same thing,” she said. “She had some sort of strange thing done to her face a couple years ago… She looked shocking… then… she started to look like a normal woman again. She looked great. And now she is starting to drift over again… with the cheeks in particular.”
This merry-go-round, Lauren said, is part of an age-old dilemma for women in Hollywood. “What I found really hypocritical is that they keep saying ‘she has defined beauty standards’; ‘she has defined age standards’; ‘she is so beautiful at 62,'” he noted. “Sixty-two is not old. People are beautiful at any age. But it was so hypocritical because, in Hollywood, they are the ones who created the age and beauty standards that are so unrealistic.”
Toto noted the conversation is apropos given the subject matter of the film Moore was nominated for. “The whole thing is that the movie that she was nominated for was all about these beauty standards, all about how cruel Hollywood is for treating women differently as they get older,” he explained. “And what did she do? She just changed her face… She is living a life that is really kind of a contrast to the movie itself… about eternal youth… the cruelty of Hollywood. And she is just saying, ‘Yeah, I am going to play the game.'”
Megyn’s Message
Megyn acknowledged that Moore is essentially in a no-win situation. “Being in Hollywood is a lot of pressure… I feel for these women because they can’t have a career past a certain age unless they get all the stuff done,” she said. “But then you do need the best friend or the husband to be like, ‘Sweetheart, you’ve gone too far’… More is not more is not more in some areas, and facial filler is definitely one of them.”
With that, she had “a message to my fellow women”:
“It is okay to have lines on your face. It is fine. I am big on Botox – I have told the audience that – but I am very anti-filler because all it does is make you look bloated and kind of fat. I would much rather have these lines here [around my mouth]. They are lines because I am 54. Lines come on your face when you are 54. You can do something about the ones [on your forehead], but you can’t do much about these [smile lines]. And that is fine. You might as well let them come instead of making yourself look weirdly fat and bloated on an otherwise stunning face.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Lauren and Toto by tuning in to episode 1,017 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.