Earlier this month Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that “Anora,” the frantic story of a New York stripper’s romance with a young Russian man, took top honors as part of a historic haul.
Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become one of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscars blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented — often onscreen. She says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world.
“Here is where I run into problems with the right,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They’re never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be, ‘The Oscars suck,’ and I was going to have to stand apart from that.”
Stone’s advice to the right: Take the win. And after some Monday-morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content (just one brief comment about President Trump by the host, Conan O’Brien) and for Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech, in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids — “relatable to any middle-American,” said a Daily Caller writer.
Stone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life: an apostate from the mainstream, in recovery from her earlier liberalism. During the 2010s, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she had been out in front, celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
For Stone, and many in her current cohort, 2020 was a pivotal year. She underwent a transformation, and ever since, she has leaned into punditry of the Make America Great Again variety. She voted for President Trump in November, and on social media and on her personal Substack, she can be vitriolic, even incendiary. “Ukraine and transing the kids. That’s all the Democrats stand for now,” went a recent, not unrepresentative post on X.
Provocations like that cost her money. One in particular did much of the damage. After Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president last summer and drew support from White Dudes for Harris and similar groups of white women, Stone quoted a social media post mocking those affinity groups with the phrase “White power!” She said it was a joke; many movie studios either disagreed or didn’t see the humor. The majority that advertised on her site pulled their ads.
Stone has interpreted the blowback as an overreaction from Hollywood, the same people she says are responsible for diminishing the movies by forcing them to serve liberal politics. In her telling, it was the movies shifting so far to the left that prompted her to move to the right. Or as Stone, who peppers her prose with analogies to her beloved American cinema of the 1970s, might put it: Like Han Solo, the industry shot first.
“Some days I forget what the left is now,” she wrote on her personal Substack last summer, “and I assume that we still live in a country with a culture that supports free expression. But we do not live in such a country, not with the left dominating culture. Everyone is potentially a thought criminal or some baddie.”
Clarence Moye, a former writer for Stone’s Oscars site, said he felt that the responses that Stone’s new views provoked — which included not just the nixed advertising but also a Hollywood Reporter article on her turn — contributed to her shift. “The harder they pushed on her, the harder she pushed back and the farther she got away — the farther right she went,” he said.
Stone’s bottom line may have taken a hit, but she has become part of a different branch of media, where she has written an op-ed for The New York Post and appeared on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show. Since the raft of summer ad cancellations on Awards Daily, Stone has replaced some of the lost income with proceeds from her political Substack, to which one can subscribe.
“There’s nothing exciting happening in Hollywood. It’s boring,” Stone said in an interview in February. “The movies are boring. Everything is boring.
”Politics isn’t boring, because politics is real life,” she added. “Look at what Trump is doing with his administration: He’s casting it like a TV show, and he’s not paying attention to the rules. He is a guy who likes to entertain, and so he’s entertaining people. They can’t look away.”
Stone’s love of movies was forged one summer during her childhood. She and her sister, amid turmoil in their personal lives, found escapism and constancy by going to see the same movie over and over. The summer was 1975; the movie was “Jaws.”
Twenty-some years later she was on a Usenet forum trying to convince people that James Cameron’s epic blockbuster “Titanic” would win the best picture Oscar over the gritty neo-noir “L.A. Confidential.” Her opinion — believe it or not — put her in the minority then. She was right, of course.
And she was hooked. She started her site Oscar Watch in 1999 (she changed her blog’s name after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued). In his 2023 book, “Oscar Wars,” Michael Schulman identifies Stone as one of the founders of awards blogging. In 2014, New York magazine labeled Tom O’Neil, of the site Gold Derby, and Stone “the Adam and Eve of Oscar blogging.”
Dave Karger, a Turner Classic Movies host who formerly wrote an Oscars column for Entertainment Weekly, praised Stone’s coverage from when they were on the same beat “Sasha is one of the most enterprising and passionate Oscars writers, if you will, I’ve ever encountered,” he said.
Her site started at the optimal moment, right as the blogosphere flowered and as Oscar campaigns became full-fledged spectacles. An Oscars-industrial complex emerged, involving the talent, the studios, the Academy, and the outlets and journalists covering it all.
“It was never about the Oscars themselves,” Stone said. “It was about the lead-up, and it was about the why of it — why do some films win?” The answer, which intrigued Stone, was that awards were often doled out to films for reasons beyond just their intrinsic merits. It was a tradition stretching all the way back to the victory by “How Green Was My Valley” at the 1942 ceremony over the scandalously fictionalized biopic of a famous media baron called “Citizen Kane.”
Moye recalled Stone’s steadfast advocacy years before #OscarsSoWhite became a rallying cry. In the run-up to the 2012 ceremony, for example, Stone was outspoken in support for Viola Davis (“The Help”) to win best actress over Meryl Streep for “The Iron Lady.” (Streep won, for the third time.)
“I was what you might call the first ‘woke’ blogger,” Stone said. But after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, she sensed that something changed. The entire industry, she now argues, had become captured by an ideology that prioritized a movie’s perceived politics. As she wrote in a recent article in Tablet, “‘La La Land’ was racist, so ‘Moonlight’ had to win. ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ was racist, so ‘The Shape of Water’ had to win. By the time ‘Green Book’ came along, everyone in Hollywood had lost their minds. ”
A small but growing number of movies with expressly conservative messages have started to flourish. The 2023 surprise hit “Sound of Freedom,” last year’s Daily Wire-produced documentary “Am I Racist?” and the recent biopic “Reagan” were all success stories from this new ecosystem. But Stone believes that the mainstream movie industry remains where the action is. “There is no wiggle room from Hollywood to ease up on their one-sided point of view,” Stone wrote in an email recently, “and the conservatives haven’t yet produced the thriving cinema they would need to mount a real challenge.”
Friends detect in Stone the manifestation of an innate contrarian. “She has always admired Hollywood for the films of the ’60s and ’70s that broke the mold, that were pushing back against authority and the Man,” said Moye, her former colleague.
“The way Hollywood seems more in the gear of, ‘You have to have a certain amount of representation within projects,’” he added, “that is anathema to her, because she doesn’t think that’s where art comes from.”
And some feel a Hollywood vibe shift is afoot. Disney is moving away from hot-button cultural issues. The Oscars recently announced that Conan O’Brien would return next year, a sign that the industry approved of his largely apolitical hosting.
It can seem at times that Stone is offended less on behalf of the country than on behalf of cinema. “What the bizarre 2016-to-2020 era did for me,” she said, “was it made the Oscars a lot less interesting.” During this year’s lead-up, Stone thought this would be the last year she dedicated to fully covering awards season. But she also said she may not be done with them after all.
“There are a lot of awful people who are waiting to see my site come to an end,” she said in an email, “and I don’t want to give them that victory.”
Besides, she added, it has been her job for 25 years. And either way, it is plain that she cannot give up completely on the movies.
“A win for ‘Anora,’” Stone had written before the ceremony, “is an indication of a pendulum swing afoot.”
In what could double as a personal manifesto, she added: “No one looks at that movie for THE MESSAGE. It’s just a good movie.”
