Surprise wins for actresses Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres at the Globes mean that the road to the Oscars may have plenty more thrills to come.

This year’s Golden Globes did what those awards do best: shook up a major Oscar race, when Demi Moore won best actress in a musical or comedy for the body-horror satire The Substance, and Fernanda Torres won in the drama category for the Brazilian political film I’m Still Here. Both actresses had been far down on most Oscar prediction lists, mentioned as unlikely possibilities. But their unexpected wins, plus the fact that both gave stirring, eloquent acceptance speeches, now puts them firmly in the mix for nominations.

Let’s be blunt about what the Globes are. As awards, they’re candy, an excuse for a glitzy, starry show, where everyone from Nicole Kidman to Harrison Ford and Zendaya turn up. The Globes were reconstituted two years ago when the scandal-ridden Hollywood Foreign Press Association was bought out by corporate owners, and its membership changed. But the 334 Globe voters, from international publications or websites, do not overlap with the more than 9,000 people who can vote for Oscars. Winning a Globe is all about momentum and being perceived as a winner, or at least a competitor to be taken seriously. That is why those wins are such good news for Moore and Torres.

Moore’s performance as a television personality pushed aside for a younger replacement (Margaret Qualley) is strong, but an Oscar campaign needs more than that, and she has the kind of comeback narrative awards voters love. She smartly emphasised it in her acceptance speech, beginning with the fact that she had never been awarded for acting in her long career. She mentioned her own insecurity, how a producer told her 30 years ago that she was “a popcorn actress” who could make money but not be taken seriously, an idea she internalised – a nice touch of modesty. Then, she said, “As I was at a low point, I had this creative, out of the box, bonkers script come across my desk, called The Substance”. That kind of resurgence plays right into voters’ hands, as it did when Ke Huy Quan won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once after having left acting for decades. And it helps that the theme of The Substance, the necessity and the high cost of Hollywood vanity and stardom, resonates among voters.

Torres, a veteran actress but hardly a Hollywood star, was even more of a surprise, but her win is well deserved. Her fierce, understated performance is the heart of Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, in which she plays a woman whose husband, a former politician, is among the disappeared victims of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Torres’s speech included an affecting dedication to her own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who plays her character’s mother in the film and who was nominated for a Globe and an Oscar 25 years ago for another Salles film, Central Station. And Torres was among the few winners whose speech commented, obliquely, on the state of the world, linking the resilience her character needed to today. “There’s something that is happening now in the world with so much fear. And this is a film that helped us to think how to survive in tough times like this,” she said. It’s a hopeful message delivered with tact that Hollywood is likely to welcome.