Earlier this month, Sasha Stone saw only Oscars at her home in a town outside of Los Angeles. For anyone who spent more than 20 years as one of the best recorders of the awards season, it was a prominent way to attend the ceremony. However, she was excited that “Anola,” the desperate story of New York Striper's romance with a young Russian man, had earned the highest honors as part of a historic haul.
Stone believed that the film had a virtue of not imposing a partisan agenda. When she named her as an Oscar blogger, Stone believes she fits neatly into the current state of Hollywood and the liberal brand it represents – often on-screen. She says she sees her old ways of thinking, even if she continues to understand better the older ways than conservatives who were not part of that world.
“This is where I run into rights issues,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They're never going to give Oscars or Hollywood any credibility. I knew the script was thinking, 'Oscars suck'.
Stone's advice to the right: win. And after Monday morning carping, it did collectively. The ceremony attracted praise from conservatives for its largely non-political content (host Conan O'Brien's brief comment about President Trump and Kieran Culkin's acceptance speech.
Stone, 60, is an increasingly familiar figure in his conservative life. She is a mainstream apostate and is recovering from her early liberalism. In the 2010s, popular culture seemed to move left, so she went forward and celebrated pass-break Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.
For Stone, and many in her current cohort, 2020 was crucial. She has undergone transformation, but ever since, she has once again leaned against the great and great kind of Panditry in America. She voted for President Trump in November, on social media and on her personal substance. “It's beyond Ukraine and kids. That's all about Democrats right now,” he wrote a post that wasn't recently, and not representative.
Such a provocation costs her money. One in particular caused a lot of damage. After Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate for president last summer, and gained support from white people for a similar group of Harris and white women, Stone cited the social media post as ocking the phrase “White power!” She said it was a joke. Many film studios either didn't see the humor or didn't see the humor. The majority of people advertised on her site drew ads.
Stone interpreted the blowback as an overreaction from Hollywood. The same people she says are responsible for reducing the film by forcing them to serve liberal politics. Her story suggests that it was a film that so far moved left that prompted her to move to the right. Or maybe we would say that as a stone scattered prose similar to the beloved American film of the 1970s.
“Forget what the left is now forgetting,” she wrote in her personal substance last summer. “And we assume we still live in a country with a culture that supports free expression. But we don't live in such a country, not the dominant culture on the left. Everyone is a thought crime or a villain.”
Clarence Moy, a former writer for Stone's Oscar site, said she felt that the reaction sparked by Stone's new views included not only the Knicks ads, but also the Hollywood Reporter article about her turn. “The more they pushed her up, the more she pushed her back and the farther she escaped, the more she went,” he said.
Stone's final line may have been a hit, but she became part of another media branch. There, he wrote OP-ED for the New York Post and appeared on Megyn Kelly's SiriusXM show. Since cancelling summer ads, Raft cancelled the awards every day, replaced some of the lost income with income from her political material.
“There's nothing exciting in Hollywood. It's boring,” Stone said in a February interview. “The movies are boring. Everything is boring.
“Politics is not boring, because politics is a real life,” she added. “Look at what Trump is doing in his administration. He casts it like a TV show. He doesn't pay attention to the rules. He's a person who likes to entertain, he's entertaining people. They can't look away.”
Stone's love for film was forged in the summer one summer. She and her sister find escapism and homeostasis by going to watch the same film over and over, in the chaos of their personal lives. The summer was 1975. The movie was “The Jaw.”
Twenty-one years later, she joined the Usenet forum, trying to convince people that James Cameron's epic blockbuster Titanic would win an Oscar with The Grazetion's neo-noir “La Confidential.” Her opinion – believe it or not – put her in the minority. Of course, she was right.
And she got hooked. She started Site Oscar Watch in 1999 (she changed the name of her blog after the Academy of Motion Picture and Science sued). In his 2023 book, Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman identifies Stone as one of the founders of the award. In 2014, the New York magazine was labelled Tom O'Neill and Stone from the Site Gold Derby, “Adam and Eve from the Oscar Blog.”
Dave Karger, the host of Turner's classic film, who previously wrote an Oscar column for Entertainment Weekly, praised the Stone coverage from the time it got to the same beat.
Her site began at the perfect moment as the blogosphere blossomed and the Oscar campaign became full-fledged glasses. The Oscar Industry complex appeared, involving talent, studios, academies, outlets and journalists who covered it all.
“It never happened about Oscar himself,” Stone said. “It was about lead-up and why was it the reason – why some movies win?” The intriguing answer to Stone was that awards were often kicked out into films for reasons beyond their essential merit. It was a tradition that dates back to the victory of “How Green was My Valley” at a 1942 ceremony over a fictional biopic to the famous Media Baron called “Citizen Kane.”
Moe recalled Stone's unwavering defense a few years ago when #oscarssowhite became a rally cry. For example, in the preliminary stages of the 2012 ceremony, Stone was said honestly in favor of Viola Davis (“Help”) to win the best actress in Meryl Streep in “Iron Lady.” (Streep won the third time.)
“I was what you might call your first 'wake' blogger,” Stone said. However, after Trump's first victory in 2016, she felt something had changed. She claims that the entire industry is now trapped by an ideology that prioritizes the perceived politics of films. As she wrote in a recent article on the tablet, “La La Land was racist, so “Moonlight” had to win.” “Three Signs Outside Ebbing in Missouri” were racist, so “Water Shape” had to win.
A small but growing number of films with explicitly conservative messages have begun to flourish. The 2023 surprise was a hit in “Sound of Freedom,” last year's Daily Wire-produced documentary, “Am I Racist?” And all recent biography, Reagan, was a success story for this new ecosystem. But Stone believes the mainstream film industry remains where action is. “There's no room for wiggling from Hollywood. To ease one side's perspective, Stone has recently written in an email.
Friends detect innate paradoxical manifestations with stones. “She has always admired Hollywood for her 60s and 70s films that broke the mold.
“Hollywood seems like equipment that 'we have to have a certain amount of expression within a project',” he added.
And some people feel that the change in the atmosphere of Hollywood is ongoing. Disney is away from the cultural issues of hot buttons. Oscar recently announced that Conan O'Brien will be returning next year. This is because the industry has approved his large hosting.
Sometimes, stones seem less offended than representing the film in the country. “What the strange times of 2016-2020 did for me,” she said. During this year's lead-up, Stone thought this was last year when he was completely dedicated to covering the awards season. But she also said she might not end up doing it with them.
“There are a lot of terrible people waiting for my site to finish,” she said in an email. “And I don't want to give them that victory.”
What's more, she added, that was her job for 25 years. And in any case, it's clear that she can't give up on the film entirely.
“The 'anora' victory,” Stone wrote before the ceremony. “It's a sign of a shaking pendulum.”
It can be doubled as a personal manifesto, she added:
