“I’ve been doing this a long time, over 45 years, and this is the first time I have ever won anything as an actor.” Those words from 62-year-old Demi Moore summed up a remarkable evening for older women in the movie business at the 2025 Golden Globes.
Read more: Golden Globes 2025 Red Carpet
Moore’s victory in the Best Female Actor Musical or Comedy category was matched by a surprise win for 59-year-old Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres in the equivalent Drama category – and by Zoe Saldaña, a mere 46 years old, who took the prize in the Best Supporting Female Actor category for her performance in the Mexican crime musical Emilia Pérez.
In a ceremony that offers some guidance for the awards season ahead – with Oscar voters filling out their nomination forms on 17 January – Moore will have done her chances of landing an Oscar nomination no harm with her impassioned but beautifully shaped speech which noted how corroding it had been to her to be written off as a “popcorn actress” – one whose films would be successful but who had no artistic worth.
She noted, too, the pressure on female stars in Hollywood, who can never be thin, smart or popular enough. “I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’ 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.”
Ironically, the expectations placed on women in Hollywood is the theme of the film for which she won the award. In Coralie Fargeat’s horror satire The Substance, Moore plays a fading movie star and TV fitness queen who seeks to revive her career by taking a drug that creates a much younger version of herself.
If many were backing Moore last night, Torres’s win in the Drama section over fellow and more famous nominees Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson, Angelina Jolie and Tilda Swinton was the shock of the night. In I’m Still Here, directed by Walter Salles, she plays an activist coping with the disappearance of her husband during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who was nominated for a Golden Globe 25 years ago, also appears in the film – and Torres dedicated the award to her: “This is like proof that art can endure through life.”
Saldaña’s win, accompanied by an exceptionally emotional speech in which she talked about the way in which her fellow nominees have supported and celebrated each other’s work, seems to confirm her as a front-runner in the Supporting Actress category for the Oscars on 3 March. The success of the wild and whirling Emilia Pérez, directed by the Frenchman Jacques Audiard and originally conceived as an opera, cements it as a Best Picture contender.
This extraordinary story of a trans cartel boss (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) was the night’s big winner, taking home four prizes, including Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy category, Best Original Song (“El Mal” written by Clément Ducol, Camille and Audiard) and Best Non-English Language Picture.
The other major winner was The Brutalist, about a fictional Hungarian Holocaust survivor working as an architect in postwar America. Brady Corbet’s passion project, which took seven years to make, is another movie that stands well outside the Hollywood norm: it is three hours long, has an interval, and is shot in VistaVision, a widescreen film format invented in 1954.
As Corbet pointed out when he won Best Director, its very existence was in doubt, with all the odds stacked against it. “No one was asking for a three-and-a-half-hour film about a mid-century designer…” Yet now it has landed three significant Globes, with Adrien Brody winning Best Actor in a Drama and the movie also picking up Best Picture (Drama). Those prizes put the historical film in pole position as the rest of the awards season unfolds. “Films don’t exist without the filmmakers,” noted Corbet, as he accepted the Best Picture prize. “Please let’s support them. Let’s prop them up.”
Some movies had a disappointing night, however. Wicked – though widely loved and hugely successful – looks likely to be this year’s Barbie, landing only the Cinematic Achievement Globe. The Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora, about an exotic dancer who becomes entangled in the life of a Russian playboy, came away empty-handed. Edward Berger’s Conclave, the entertaining ecclesiastical thriller led by a subtle and powerful performance from Ralph Fiennes, won only the screenplay prize for Peter Straughan’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel.
The battle lines for Best Actor between Brody, Fiennes and Timothée Chalamet, who missed out here for his turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, seem firmly drawn, although Sebastian Stan may yet be a strong contender. He was nominated for two Golden Globes, as the young Donald Trump in The Apprentice and as a man struggling with an identity crisis as he confronts his disability in A Different Man in the Musical or Comedy category. He unexpectedly won that prize, beating both Hugh Grant (for Heretic) and front-runner Jesse Eisenberg (for A Real Pain, which he also directed).
On the other hand, Kieran Culkin cemented his credentials in the Best Supporting Actor race by winning a Globe for Eisenberg’s film in which two cousins go on a trip to Poland to visit the childhood home of their grandmother. His perfectly calibrated performance as the hyperactive Benji was matched by the beautifully judged relaxation of his acceptance speech, which he said was powered by a shot of tequila.
There’s always a danger of reading too much into the Globes, now back on track after their various scandals and misfires. Yet in an awards season where the race has seemed more wide open than ever before, the love lavished on both Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist brings a certain clarity. RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, which went empty-handed here but won Best Director at the New York Film Critics Awards and may yet be garlanded with BAFTA nominations, is the other obvious contender.
But if the Best Picture focus now lands more sharply on two films, and Brody has edged ahead in the Best Actor race (he also won at the New York Critics Circle Awards, as did Culkin), the Best Female Actor category has suddenly opened up. Can Moore replicate her success at other ceremonies, or is this nod to her here the equivalent of a Lifetime Achievement Award, an embrace of a popular figure?
