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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 on screen. 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.”
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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,” a Daily Caller writer said.
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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.
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“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.”
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