The Dumbest Cancellation Story Ever?

In Hollywood, self-pity abounds, but there's no remorse for unfairly ruined careers, as Oscar writer Sasha Stone found out

Note: I started working on this California story before the wildfires broke out, so no, it’s not related, at least not directly. But it’s remarkable nonetheless.

Hopefully the era of quick-draw cancellations is coming to a close, and the story below will be among the last of its kind. What happened to Awards Daily writer Sasha Stone should stand as a monument to a lost decade, perhaps the dumbest moment in a time America will remember as its Dumb Scare.

“No one would actually believe it if they looked at it objectively in a couple of years, that this could happen to somebody,” says Stone.

On July 29 last year, “White Dudes for Harris” held a mass Zoom call, rallying the financial and organizational might of retreating beta-males in America’s top tax brackets behind the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris. The melanin-free call featured a bevy of Hollywood luminaries, from original “Dude” Jeff Bridges to Rudy star Sean Astin to un-Hulked Mark Ruffalo to Star Wars legend Mark Hamill, who scored a $50,000 donation by saying, “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”

The episode was the culmination of a trend toward the return of segregated meetings, re-branded as “affinity groups” or “exclusive spaces” according to recent academic fashion. Tens of thousands of white women held a similar event that featured influencer Arielle Fodor telling white women that if “God forbid” they felt an inclination to correct “BIPOC individuals,” they should instead “put their listening ears on” and learn to use privilege to effect positive change. Stone, an influential Hollywood blogger who essentially invented the Oscar prediction beat in the early 2000s, took to Twitter to publicly roll her eyes. “White Power!” she tweeted, in response to a Harris supporter gushing, “I’m proud to be a white woman today!”

Recapping: nearly 250,000 white people participated in a pair of Zoom calls luxuriating in shared racial identity and underscoring their potential as a collective force. In the “White Dudes” video, one participant noted with glee that America’s record-holding whites-only event had been a 1925 Ku Klux Klan rally in Washington, DC, but “it is truly a wonderful thing to be unseating the Klan with our group.” Comedian Adam Conover was thrilled, since “it is so rare that white men ever even identify ourselves,” so “we don’t have the opportunity to think of ourselves as being part of a group.” That these people thought they were doing what they were doing for a good cause doesn’t change the fact that these were, unironically, racial solidarity gatherings.

After these events, who’d be branded a racist? Two weeks later, Hollywood handed down the answer:

On August 14th, 2024, the Hollywood Reporter ran a piece about Stone by Rebecca Keegan titled, “How an Oscar Blogger Became a MAGA Darling.” The crucial part of the article was the sub-headline, which read, “Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone built a reputation as an independent voice on film, but a recent turn to the right — and a ‘white power’ comment on social media — alienated Hollywood gatekeepers while endearing her to a new Trump-loving audience.”

Truth is an absolute defense, and Stone did indeed write a “white power” comment on social media. But anyone immersed in the dark arts of headline writing will recognize the key brushstrokes. Pasted next to an assertion meant to be taken as fact (“a turn to the right,”), the line about a “‘white power’ comment on social media” reads like Stone legitimately issued a white power clarion call, maybe one-thumbing the tweet while holding a tiki torch.

Only in the body of the article do we find the passage that allows the Reporter to claim a lack of malice, and even that is almost as bad as the headline:

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…

“A quote from Sasha Stone is toxic now,” one executive told me, saying that their studio was pulling its 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.”

Stone had already become a controversial figure in Hollywood after decrying the way the industry’s political monoculture had infected moviemaking, and after suggesting actor Ansel Elgort wasn’t a “pedophile” because he had a 17-year-old girlfriend when he was 20. But the Reporter story and its “white power” headline was the turning point. “What ended my career was Rebecca’s article,” Stone says. Apple pulled ads from her Awards Daily site the day of publication, and soon every studio but one pulled their ad buys. “I went from $200,000 a year to $15,000,” she says.

Hollywood Reporter editor Maer Roshan defended the article.

“Odd moment to resurface a six month old story — we’ve been a bit preoccupied here in Los Angeles lately — but happy to clear this up for you,” Roshan said. “We point out, literally in the first graph of the story, that ‘Stone says she was making a joke about the left’s hypocritical adoption of identity politics…the silliness of segregating themselves by race.’” The piece then goes on to quote a series of Hollywood executives and Academy members who did not appreciate the irony.

He added: “Our headline accurately reflects the controversy that was sparked by her comment, and we prominently and clearly provided the context for it. I stand by the headline and the story.”

Roshan mentioned that the city is currently “a bit preoccupied”, which of course is true. It’s important to point out that Los Angeles is not on fire because it made itself the epicenter of a political witch hunt craze for the second time in a hundred years. However, it would be wrong to say the phenomena are completely unrelated.

Stone’s story on the surface is about a bad-faith reaction to a single joke ruining a career. On a larger level it’s about how the film industry has fallen from a great height because of a shift in priorities. Instead of focusing on making movies with mass appeal, studios have been shedding audience at light speed because they got into the preaching business, factory-producing films with leaden messaging. They turned Hollywood’s showcase (and Stone’s bailiwick), the Oscars, into a parody event in which the world’s most ignorant and overpaid performers lecture people with real jobs about issues they know nothing about.

The Academy this year turned the Oscars into a form of Papal Encyclical, introducing new standards that require movies to meet political requirements to be considered for awards (films can check the “on-screen representation, themes, and narratives” box if the story is “centered on an underrepresented group(s).” As Stone notes below, it’s difficult to fulfill the goal of making entertainment if you’re trying simultaneously to turn movies into vehicles for political instruction.

It would be unfair to say California set aside legitimate affairs of state (like preparing for fires) because it was consumed with turning government and public enterprises like schools into models of utopian thinking. At the same time, it’s impossible to avoid noticing that the state is massively overrepresented in the realm of stupid cancelations.

The professor who was replaced because he correctly pronounced a Chinese word that phonetically sounds like ne-ga? That was the University of California. The Mexican-American man who was fired after a fellow driver accused him of turning the “A-OK” symbol into a white power sign? He worked for San Diego Gas and Electric. The archeologist who lost her position curating a collection of bones because she posed holding an indigenous skull? She worked at San Jose State University. The instinct isn’t all in one direction, either. USC barred a pro-Palestinian valedictorian speech, and a Moreno Valley teacher was placed on leave for the sake of a more “inclusive learning environment” after flipping out online in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. California reportedly has the highest “cancel culture” score of all 50 states, with one survey showing 59% of its residents would unfollow a “canceled” person.

Stone’s story resonates the most because she works in an industry that should be acutely aware of the dangers of social purges. The film industry is tarnished by its treatment of a huge list of actors, screenwriters, directors, and other figures during the Red Scare of the forties, fifties and sixties. From Charlie Chaplin to Pete Seeger to Dashiell Hammett to Burgess Meredith (!) to John Berry, Hollywood studios worked with Congress and press jackals to consign some of its most talented people to disgrace, penury, even jail for leftist views.

The industry should be able to recognize the lurid patterns of snitch-and-defame movements, since it later made a slew of movies about the worst episodes, from Guilty by Suspicion to Good Night and Good Luck to The Front, Dash and Lilly, The Majestic, Trumbo and countless others. This doesn’t count the many great period films about the dangers of conformity and group cowardice, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, On the Waterfront, and High Noon.

Hollywood hasn’t learned, spending an inordinate amount of the last decade shunning and punishing its own. Racket readers may recall hearing from the great Tim Robbins on the industry’s atrocious bullying during the Covid-19 period, but there have also been exhaustive episodes involving Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Jonah Hill, Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr and countless others (so many that IndieWire could put out a listicle just about stars canceled between production and release). There’s an even longer list of movies, new and old, that have been deemed “problematic,” forcing directors to worry about the judgments of future culture warriors, which may be one reason why the scripts of so many big-ticket movies read like formless puddles of progressive goo à la Avatar. As Stone wrote, studios hoping to win Oscars know their movie “can’t just be good — it has to completely satisfy the requirements of an industry seeking to right the wrongs of the past, right the wrongs of the Oscars. It has to offend no one.”

Stone’s story will touch a nerve for anyone who’s been through one of these episodes. From around the time she came out in defense of Green Book she knew the moment would eventually come when someone in the industry would decide to do a story on her. The surprise was that it came over something so stupid. It’s unfortunate for her, but will also make her an eloquent spokesperson when, someday, someone decides to write a screenplay about Hollywood’s second historical witch hunt: The Dumb Scare.

More from Stone, who can be found on her Substack, Free Thinking (Racket subscribes):

MT: Is your story the oddest cancellation tale in a period full of them? The silliest?

Sasha Stone: It’s really wild and hard to explain to people. No one would actually believe it if they looked at it objectively in a couple of years that this could happen to somebody.

MT: Is it possible the Hollywood Reporter didn’t understand the “white power” joke? It seems impossible.

Sasha Stone: This journalist named Rebecca Keegan, who I always really liked… she is a nice person. I always thought, and I know that with journalists, it’s not about being a nice person or whatever. I’m savvy enough to know that I learned that lesson early on. They really want to get the story, and it’s not personal, and I get it. [But it was] terrifying to have someone go around to publicists and Oscar voters with these questions — I mean, I have no idea who it was that they ran this by.

Suddenly I got the label that I was toxic. These people would never have known about it if she hadn’t asked. They don’t look at Twitter. But the fact that she was validating it in that magazine, that was catastrophic. Apple pulled their ads from my site that day. Every year I’d sell out my inventory, so much so that I have to write extra advertorials to accommodate the studios. I don’t make as much, as I’m a small fry. But they always wanted to advertise with me because I got here first, and helped start this whole industry, and I have a very influential loud microphone, or I used to.

MT: But the piece came out, and that changed?

Sasha Stone: Yeah, only one studio had the guts to advertise. They were that one family in Jaws that walks in the water. Remember how the Mayor was like, come on in!

MT: The 4th of July scene?

Sasha Stone: (laughs) Yeah. “Please. Get in the water.” So I went from $200,000 a year to $15,000. One little tiny ad buy, but I praise them for having the courage to do it at all.

MT: How did you get into covering the Oscars?

Sasha Stone: I was basically on Usenet in a cinema group for five years writing... that’s when I got into Oscar predicting. I predicted that Titanic would beat LA Confidential, and I was so happy when I got it right that it sent me on this thing. I started to think, why didn’t Citizen Kane win the Oscar? I’m going to make a website. People were just starting to build websites. It was like nobody really thought the internet was going to be profitable at this time. They called it the dot-bomb. Everybody was doing startups and they were failing, but it was like the wild, wild West. Anybody anybody could build anything.

I thought, “Oscars, they kind of have heat. People are interested in this subject. I’m interested in it. So let me build a website.” So I built this thing.

MT: When did things in Hollywood start to change, both with Hollywood and with its relationship to you?

Sasha Stone: So Trump wins in 2016, and it causes mass hysteria in the industry. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was a Hillary supporter. I was very devoted. The last article I wrote before the election was something like How Obama and Hillary are making “Hamilton’s America” or something like that. This is our future. A woman’s going to be president after the first black president. And I wrote that article on my side about Hamilton because I’d taken my daughter for her 18th birthday to New York to see Hamilton. Which was just before the election. I went to the Oscars the year that La La Land was up against Moonlight. And you could feel the chill in the room against La La Land when the title was called, there’d be a hush through the crowd, and nobody would clap. And I remember in the months or weeks leading up to the Oscars, there was this narrative that La La Land was racist.

MT: I don’t remember. Why was La La Land racist?

Sasha Stone: Because Ryan Gosling knows about jazz and talks about jazz. And I bought into it. I bought into it so much that the producer of the movie wrote me a letter saying, what are you doing? Why are you saying that this movie is this and that, and what he got back from me was just, “Well, Hillary didn’t win and Trump won, and this movie is not serious, and it doesn’t say anything about our world.” And I wasn’t the only one. Everybody felt that way. It was a second kind of election, like La La Land had all these nominations, and yet people wanted Moonlight to win. The celebrities were out saying, you have to pick Moonlight. [Eds. note: Moonlight had an all-black cast.] It turned into this political thing when Moonlight won.

Sasha Stone on the job, with festival lanyard

Sasha Stone: The next year they said that Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was racist. A big thing started again just like it did with La La Land. Something in me, I don’t know what it was or why, but I stopped and I said, “Okay, this isn’t right. It’s not a racist movie. It’s Francis McDormand, Martin McDonagh. These people are not racist.” And so I started writing articles about it, and I got called out on Twitter by a prominent black film critic. I became a target then. And as cancel culture unfolded, I became the person who stood up for people being canceled. I don’t understand why this is my role in life, but it was, maybe it’s being a middle child and thinking everything’s unfair.

But it seemed wrong to me that people would be. It reminded me of Salem, which I knew a lot about, and obviously The Red Scare. These mechanisms of mass hysteria and paranoia and purges seemed really familiar to me. It was a pattern playing out. And I thought, “I’m not going to go along with this. The right thing to do is to not go along with this.” And it just went on and on. I just kept getting more and more bullied and more and more attacked by people in the industry. They called me racist, white supremacist, transphobic. Obviously there’s that line you can’t cross and they can treat you this way, which they did with me. And they would always say, “You’re bringing it on yourself. You don’t have to make a big deal about this.” But I always felt like I couldn’t say nothing.

MT: I think the point is that you do have to say something. That’s one of the two choices, the other being bad. Were people grateful that you stood up for them at least?

Sasha Stone: It’s funny. There was one man about whom one woman said, “Ten years ago, you put your hand down my pants and sniffed it and then laughed with your buddies.” That ruined this man’s career. Everything was over. He lost all of his jobs, all of his income. He was hated. They called him a sexual assaulter. I stood up for him. I wrote a thing about him. I had his back. I took no end of shit from people for it for years, before the Trump thing happened. That was the only thing they had on me. It was, “You defend people accused of sexual assault.” They’d bring up his name, and that was associated with me for years.

The coda of this horrible story is that when he saw me on Megan Kelly, he called me out on Twitter! I couldn’t believe it. Something like, “Of all the things I thought would ever happen, I never thought this would happen.” So he threw me under the bus after that.

MT: Hollywood loyalty.

Sasha Stone: Yes.

MT: The ironic plot twist is the white power business, sold in the Hollywood Reporter subhead as if you were not making a joke. Have you run into anyone who really believes this was an unironic call for “white power”?

Sasha Stone: The Telluride Film Festival, I had been going there for ten years or more, and it’s where the publicists squire the bloggers around with the clients, and you get invited to a patron’s brunch at the beginning of the festival, and I always got invited to that. I always felt really proud because I was one of the few independent sites that got invited, and a lot of people envy me for it. And it’s up on top of this big mountain, and they serve an incredible champagne brunch with grass fed beef and all the really nice fancy stuff on top of this beautiful mountain. And there are always celebrities there. Robert Redford, Francis Ford Coppola, whoever is there to pitch their movie.

But I went every year, and so that was the first thing that happened. I got disinvited to that. Because people in that article apparently said, “Oh, we’re just not going to invite her to screenings or anything like that, or parties.” And that was true. They didn’t. I got nothing from publicists. Usually they’re like, “Oh, you want to come see this movie? You want to talk to this person?” Nope, nothing. They refuse to this day to blurb any of my articles. I don’t aspire to be blurbed by so many other people, but it’s weird when they just suddenly decide that your name is so toxic, they can’t even put “Greatest film ever made!” on an ad.

I would be embarrassed to be any of these people. I would be embarrassed to be a celebrity that was part of this industry. I would never want to have anything to do with people that act like this. Take Jack Smith. That’s the name of the prosecutor, right? He was there wandering around Telluride and Hillary Clinton was there, and that’s how enmeshed this world is with the Democrats. He was crossing. He looked like a real dudebro. He didn’t look like a suit.

MT: We used to joke that The Hill is Hollywood for ugly people. But now the crossover goes the other way. You’re talking about Jack Smith at a film festival. Are these crowds interchangeable? And is that one of the reasons why Hollywood has become such a monoculture? Movie star, political star, the lines have become fuzzy. Weirdly in both realms, popular support seems to have been deemphasized.

Sasha Stone: Absolutely. I told people on Twitter a few months back, I say the best thing Hollywood can do right now is divorce itself from the Democratic Party. It is chilling to see that you have to be able to separate them because think of all the great stories that are happening right now that can’t be told, like the story of the coup to oust Joe Biden, or whatever you want to call it. That is the most powerful, interesting story that’s happened in American politics after Watergate. And there’s no way they can tell that story because they’re too deferential to Obama, who’s a leader in Hollywood. He’s even got a Netflix deal. That’s how close they are.

It’s sometimes hard to articulate, but basically what happened is they gave up the free market. What would be great is if Hollywood could hear people voting by how many tickets they buy. And the box office is its own story, but the Oscars themselves are supposed to award movies that are relevant, that made a lot of money that a lot of people saw. But most people I know have no idea what would even be nominated for Best Picture either this year or any other year.

MT: I couldn’t even guess. Will it come back?

Sasha Stone: Hopefully.

MT: Thanks for talking.

Sasha Stone: Thank you.