That was the question on everyone’s minds at the ELLE Women In Hollywood Awards at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles on Monday night.

The 45 year old Oscar winner hasn’t been seen in public much as of late, and when she arrived at the event with her boyfriend Doyle Bramhall II in tow, people “almost didn’t recognize her” according to a source for New York’s Daily News. But when they realized it was indeed Zellweger, the speculation was rampant as to whether or not she had undergone an extensive amount of cosmetic surgery.

“From afar no one could notice anything different…but when people got up close to her they were taken back by what she had done to her face,” said the source. “Everyone was whispering about how different she looked.”

After a succession of box office hits throughout the 90’s and the 00’s, two Academy Award nominations for her roles in Bridget Jones’ Diary and Chicago, and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cold Mountain, Zellweger had been making fewer public appearances. Her last film role was in 2010, but she has two movies coming out next year, The Whole Truth, and an adaptation of the best-selling novel Same Kind of Different As Me.

Reactions to her photographs from the event at the Four Seasons were plastered all across social media and gossip sites, with some calling it no big deal to snarky comparisons being made between her look now and her look as recently 2012, asking if it was actually the same person in both images.

Perhaps the most accurate reaction though, was the one from Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy of UK’s The Guardian, who wrote in her column today:

“We expect our celebrity women to truly have it all: beauty, youth, talent, humility and a conscientious disdain for how their appearances figure into their ability to practice their art unless, of course, it is somehow serving their art. Pity the woman so brazen as to pull back the curtain on these expectations by letting herself be seen in public past a certain age – with or without the help of the medical community,” wrote Uffalussy. “Spare us the sight, we demand, of what our hypocrisy wreaks on our all-too-human idols.”