HOLLYWOOD – Of all the Oscar winners backstage, Julianne Moore may have been the most ebullient.
“I never imagined this. I certainly never imagined that I would win [Best Actress at] Cannes [for “Maps to the Stars”] in the spring and then kind of follow it up with an Oscar for another film,” said the “Still Alice” star after winning the award for Best Actress. “So that's just — it's beyond — I keep saying this to my publicist who is over there. I'm like, Is this happening? Can this be happening? It's pretty crazy.”
Also crazy? Her husband predicted she would win the Oscar before the movie even came out.
“This is the first time I've told anybody this, and I'll tell you guys in this room,” she confided. “He was the first person to see the movie. The first time I saw the cut, he came with me. And I told the story about how I heard him crying, and I was like, 'What's going on?' When we walked out of there, he said, 'You're going to win an Oscar.' And I was like, 'Come on.' I swear to God, that's what he said to me. And I just couldn't believe he said that.”
So will raising the profile of a small, character-driven film like “Still Alice” during awards-season help turn the tide in Hollywood toward more sophisticated adult fare? Given that it's made less than $10 million at the box office, we can safely say no. Still, it's nice to think about.
“I think there's an audience for movies like this,” said Moore. “I go to the movies because, like I said, I like to see complicated, interesting stories about people and relationships, you know. So I think whenever there's success with films like this, then they kind of — even people think about them more. I don't know. You know, you never know. You know, at the end of the day, Hollywood is also a business, so I think it depends on how many people buy tickets.”