How an Oscar Blogger Became a MAGA Darling

On July 30, the day after the “White Dudes for Harris” meeting convened Kamala Harris supporters on Zoom, Sasha Stone posted the phrase “White power!” from the X account of the entertainment news site she owns, Awards Daily. Stone, a pioneer in the field of Oscar punditry and regular attendee at prestigious film festivals like Telluride and Savannah, says she was making a joke about the left’s hypocritical adoption of identity politics. “I was just pointing out the silliness of segregating themselves by race,” she told me in a phone interview a few days later. But the post, which she has since deleted along with all of her tweets more than a few days old, attracted the attention of studio executives, film festival programmers and publicists.

“A quote from Sasha Stone is toxic now,” one executive told me, saying that their studio was pulling their ad dollars from Awards Daily. A representative for another studio said they would no longer invite her to screenings and events. “If she’s trying to be sarcastic,” said a high-profile Academy member, “It’s not funny.” Within two weeks, three of Awards Daily’s most prolific contributors announced they were leaving Stone’s website to found a new one of their own.

The white power “boo-boo” as Stone called it on her Substack, “Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning,” has shone a light on the political evolution of the Oscar blogger, who had long been a vocal Democrat, but has drifted rightward in recent years and cultivated a persona as a recovering Hollywood liberal. As her Awards Daily writers were posting business-as-usual stories on movie trailers and film festival lineups, Stone was penning columns on her Substack with headlines like, “The Red Pill Revolution,” “JD Vance is a Hero” and, in a recent post about me contacting her for this story, “How Did Orwell Know?”

“I knew it was dangerous for me to head down this road and I hid it for a long time,” Stone says, of her political shift. “Most of the people I used to count on as friends have stopped talking to me.” While Stone has provoked reactions from cringe to outrage for her comments on race, gender and sexuality, the white power remark may be the one to finally get her exiled from Hollywood. In some ways, the ostracism seems like what she’s wanted, living proof of her thesis on the left’s growing intolerance.

A self-described “creature of the internet,” Stone, who is in her late 50s, has long written with an outsider’s voice, and some among the small circle of people who closely follow film awards appreciated her perspective as an antidote to the perceived monolith of Film Twitter. “She used to be a little bit anti-bullshit,” says one publicist who represents multiple Oscar winners. “She gave a real read. We appreciated that.”

In 2017, when some film writers began calling film festival darling Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri racist, Stone wrote a piece defending the movie. In 2019, when Green Book was at the center of a debate over its racial politics and old stories about director Peter Farrelly and a tweet from co-writer and producer Nick Vallelonga surfaced, she was quoted in the Wall Street Journal decrying the “destruction” of the filmmakers. “It’s almost as if nothing else matters except for these political points,” Stone said at the time. She also defended Ansel Elgort during the 2020 rollout of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story when the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl (Elgort has denied the allegation). Controversies aside, these movies mostly ended up doing fine in the Oscar race — Green Book won best picture and the other two films collected seven nominations a piece, including best picture. But Stone herself says she came out of those experiences wounded. “Film Twitter, they bullied me,” she says, likening her treatment to the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. “The more that happened to me, the more I started to move away from the left.” 

Stone’s relationship with attention is a complicated one, and for all her online bravura, she is shy in person, often skipping cocktail parties, crowded screenings and other schmoozy awards season events. For years she shared nude photos of herself on a Flickr account. “I was bored and I wanted a romantic life,” she says. “I stopped because it wasn’t fulfilling.” Stone admits she’s lonely — one of her few remaining friends is another self-styled anti-woke writer, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, whom she once dated and who is best known for having asked director James Mangold for nude outtakes of an actress and for writing about subjects like Emma Stone’s “slender, shovel-like feet” in a review of last year’s Oscar contender Poor Things. (Wells wrote about this story twice before it published).

Stone comes by her firebrand status organically. She grew up in the hippie bastions of Topanga Canyon and Ojai, California, the child of a cocktail waitress and a schizophrenic jazz drummer who divorced when she was three. She describes her mother as a “hellcat” who remarried, flipped houses and eventually found success in real estate. Stone has alluded to being a victim of child abuse in the past. She appears in a 2021 episode of the David Fincher-produced Netflix show Voir, a series of video essays about cinema, in which she talks about seeing Jaws as a kid and discovering movies as a place of escape. Over a dramatization of a little girl in the bathtub with bruised legs, Stone narrates about a “new man” in her mom’s life and how Jaws “gave us something to turn to instead of someone to run away from.” When asked about the abuse, Stone says she prefers not to dwell. “We spend a lot of time on the left in therapy,” she says. “My story was always, ‘I’m an abused child’ and I don’t want that to be my story anymore. My mother had four kids before the age of 25. In the 70s people were really violent with their kids. It was a hard way to grow up.” Today Stone lives in a small city not far from Los Angeles, in an ADU on one of her mother’s properties. 

After finishing high school in Ojai, Stone moved to LA to try to become an actress. She failed at that, but graduated from UCLA with a degree in playwriting, placed in the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Awards and began writing about movies as a hobby on early Internet listservs. In 1998, she had a daughter with a man she met online, a relationship that soon ended. 

In 1999, living out of a guest house in Van Nuys with her newborn, Stone built what would become one of the very first Oscar blogs, which she called Oscarwatch, until the Academy sued her and she changed it to Awards Daily. The industry of exhaustive Oscar coverage, in which THR is also a player, exploded in the aughts, and Stone was one of its chief contributors, building her site as she held other jobs, including horoscope writer, janitor and teacher’s aide. She did the writing, web design and ad sales herself, before eventually bringing on some freelance contributors. Stone is known more for passionately backing movies than for harshly panning them, and her predictive instincts have been strong over the years. In 2023, Awards Daily made between $200,000 and $300,000, Stone says.

After Green Book, Stone saw herself as bullied by hysterical finger pointers, and she began to see Trump as a victim too. In May of 2020, her irritation at the political left grew when Covid-19 shut down college campuses and her daughter had to celebrate her NYU graduation at home on their balcony in Burbank. “We were all sewing our own masks, making our own hand sanitizers, and all of a sudden George Floyd is killed and the lockdowns are over,” Stone says. “I watched as all of the Democrats and their experts started to say, ‘Well, it’s OK because systemic racism is worse than the pandemic.’” She got angrier, she says, when she watched the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, which ultimately led to Trump’s indictment over the mishandling of classified documents. “I think what our government has done to Trump is dangerous,” she says. “The goal was to stop him from running again.”

As Stone wrote about her growing skepticism of the left, a new audience began discovering her. Her Substack now has more than 17,000 subscribers, and she has appeared on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show. “The Trump stuff does sell better,” Stone says. “People are interested in it to hate read. Or they’re interested in it because they’re Trump supporters. I see doors opening and a horizon of opportunity.” As Trump voters have arrived, some of Stone’s Hollywood readers have started to worry about her. “Is she OK?” one studio source asked me after the white power tweet. “It seems like she’s really gone down a rabbit hole.” 

While Stone has been finding a new political audience, the freelance writers who have been populating much of Awards Daily’s coverage are leaving. “She’s been on her own journey that doesn’t necessarily feel reflective of the rest of the Awards Daily team,” says Megan McLachlan, who is departing as the site’s TV editor after 10 years of writing for Stone, alongside multiple other writers, to found The-Contenders.com. “Her content was shifting in a way that didn’t align with our vision.”

Stone says she still plans to attend the Telluride Film Festival this Labor Day weekend, where she says people “tolerate” her. And she says she is not worried about losing her entertainment awards-related income. “Part of me has dreamt of a year where I could just do the Oscars and be honest and not have to worry about getting a publicist mad at me,” Stone says. “If they do take [advertising money and access] away, it’ll be the greatest thing that ever happened, because I can finally tell all.”