Demi Moore grits her teeth and looks disappointed after 2025 Oscar loss to Mikey Madison

Demi Moore didn’t take home the gold at the 2025 Academy Awards.

“The Substance” star, 62, lost the trophy for Best Actress at the Oscars on Sunday to Mikey Madison, 25, who won for her role in “Anora.”

Moore looked visibly disappointed and gritted her teeth as Madison’s name was called, as seen in a video on X.

The actress quickly recovered and started clapping for Madison.

“This is very surreal,” Madison stated as she accepted the award. “I grew up in Los Angeles, but Hollywood always felt so far away from me, so to be here, standing in this room today is really incredible.”

“I just want to recognize and honor the sex worker community,” she added. “Yes. I will continue to support and be an ally. All of the incredible people, the women that I’ve had the privilege of meeting from that community has been one of the highlights of this incredible experience.”

Madison noted, “I also just want to recognize the thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, breathtaking work of my fellow nominees. I’m honored to be recognized alongside all of you. This is a dream come true.”

“Anora” is about a sex worker (Madison) who gets her fairy tale after marrying the son of a Russian oligarch until his parents get wind of their union.

“The Substance,” meanwhile, followed an Oscar-winning actress (Moore) turned fitness guru and TV star whose career abruptly ended after turning 50.

Despite losing, Moore’s co-star Dennis Quaid knew early on that she was destined for greatness in this role.

“I knew it like my second day working on that movie. I told Demi she’s going to win an Oscar for it,” Quaid, 70, exclusively told The Post last month.

“It’s just an incredible performance. It’s a gargantuan effort. I mean, it took nine months to do that. She was in makeup for like six, eight hours at a time. And the whole movie, what it says — Coralie [Fargeat] as a director, I just love working with her. She reminds me of Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah put together,” he said.

Originally, Moore was not even expected to nab an Oscar nomination when awards season kicked off in earnest just two months ago.

No one was more surprised than the “Indecent Proposal” star when her name was called out by Kerry Washington as the winner for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at the 2025 Golden Globes on Jan. 5.

Beating out frontrunners Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked) and Madison (“Anora”), a stunned Moore delivered the evening’s most memorable acceptance speech.

“I really wasn’t expecting that. I’m just in shock right now. I’ve been doing this a long time, like, over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor, and I’m just so humbled and so grateful,” Moore said.

The actress then revealed a story about how a Hollywood producer once told her she’d never be more than a “popcorn actress” – in other words, she might star in blockbuster hits, but she’d never win critical acclaim for her work. That calculus proved wrong.

“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress,’” Moore confessed. “And at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have. That could do movies that were successful that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged.”

Moore continued, “And I bought in and I believed that. And that corroded me over time to the point where I thought, a few years ago, that maybe this was it. Maybe I was complete. Maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do.”

“In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough or basically just not enough,” Moore said.

But that mode of thinking was derailed when a woman told her, “Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.”

The message stuck.

“And so today, I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me and for the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong,” Moore said.

The speech shot her to the head of the pack of actresses vying for the Oscar. Speaking for many who posted on social media, praising Moore’s paean to the power of the human spirit, critic Zoë Rose Bryant wrote on X, “She might be taking it all after that speech.”

Indeed, Moore did go on to score some of the season’s most coveted acting prizes, including Best Actress wins at the SAG and Critics’ Choice Awards ceremonies.

“This has been such a wild ride, I can’t tell you when I started this journey on this film, I could never imagine being here,” she said at the Critics’ Choice Awards in Santa Monica, California, on Feb. 7, continuing her streak of inspirational speeches. “It’s so far beyond what I hoped for.”

She added, “For anybody out there who is still on their journey, who is still struggling to find their way, because it hasn’t happened, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening, dreams do come true.”

Moore’s road to realizing her dream began when she got her big break in 1985’s “St. Elmo’s Fire,” which followed a group of recent college graduates’ adventures — and misadventures — as they entered the “real world.”

That movie also cemented Moore as a member of the so-called “Brat Pack,” the much-derided group of young Hollywood 1980s stars that included Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez.

But it was in the 1990s that Moore struck out on her own and became a “popcorn” queen, starring in two hit romance movies: “Ghost” (which topped the US box office in 1990) and “Indecent Proposal” (1993).

Moore also won a supporting role in the lauded 1992 military drama “A Few Good Men,” penned by Aaron Sorkin.

She made history in 1995 when she earned $12.5 million to star in “Striptease,” which followed a former FBI office assistant (Moore) who turned to stripping to pay for her legal fees after her ex-husband got custody of their daughter.

The payday made her not only the highest-paid actress in Hollywood at the time but also the first actress in history to make upwards of $10 million for a role.

The milestone did not endear her to the public, though, labeled in certain corners of the media as “Gimme Moore” while her then-husband, Bruce Willis, took even bigger paychecks and received no criticism on par with Moore’s.

“I think the interesting piece is that when I became the highest-paid actress — why is it that, at that moment, the choice was to bring me down?” Moore said on The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast in September.

“I don’t take this personally,” she added. “I think anyone who had been in the position that was the first to get that kind of equality of pay would probably have taken a hit.”

Acknowledging the backlash she also faced for appearing nude in the movie, Moore added, “Because I did a film that was dealing with the world of stripping and the body, I was extremely shamed.”

The star followed up “Striptease” with another controversial film, “G.I. Jane,” about a US Navy topographic analyst who joins the Navy’s Special Warfare Group and struggles to prove her worth in a unit dominated by men.

“Well, with ‘Striptease,’ it was as if I had betrayed women, and with ‘G.I. Jane,’ it was as if I had betrayed men,” Moore noted in “The Interview.”

Both “Striptease” and “G.I. Jane” flopped at the box office.

In the ensuing years, Moore would act only periodically, though she delivered memorable performances in movies such as “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (2003) and “Margin Call” (2011).

Moore discussed the possibility of losing her chance at an Oscar last month.

“Whatever happens, I just keep focusing on remembering not to make it mean too much, but also not to make it mean too little,” she told The New York Times. “But I can enjoy all of it.”