Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's do something very different.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm so pleased to welcome back to the show my
good friend Christian Toto. He is the proprietor of the
Hollywood in Toto podcast. Go look that up and subscribe
wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hollywood in Toto.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's t t O and Christian, as you well know,
is one of the nation's few right of center media
analysts and critics and.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Just an all around good guy. So Hi Christian, good
to see you.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
The few, the proud, and thelowly. Yes, thanks thanks for
having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Indeed, all right, So there's two topics that I want
to go over with you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
And just for the record, you care about this stuff
a lot more than I do. But as Hollywood stuff goes,
I find both of these at least a little bit interesting,
which is a lot more interesting than I usually find
Hollywood stuff. So let's let's talk about this actress, Carlo
Sophia Gascone.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
What's up with her and Twitter? And who?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Well, she was the star of Amelia Perez and she
is nominated for Best Actress. She's the first trans performer
to get such an honor, and there was some talk
that she might be the favorite in that category, and
then a journalist resurfaced some of Gascone's old tweets, and
they are sometimes problematic and sometimes head scratchingly obtuse. One
(01:24):
seemed to down pedal Hitler's atrocities.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I'll just put it that way.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
They're going to go go google all the posts themselves,
and it's turned the entire Oscar campaign into a nightmare.
Netflix is backpedaling from this particular performer. I think the
film's chance is at a Best Picture nomination. Are going
away certainly Best Actress as a bye bye.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Situation right now?
Speaker 4 (01:48):
And you know, there's so much to tackle with this story,
but maybe we start with should it matter?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I mean, certainly it's bad publicity.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
But if Gascone's performance is the best of the year
in the female category and we could put aside the
trans debate for now, shouldn't she win?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I mean, look, this is this is the world we
live in now, right And the fact, by the way,
the fact that you and I are talking about this
as if there's still a chance she could win, even
if it's a lower chance than before, and you might
think the chance is very low, but it's still probably
not zero.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
They're like.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
A few years ago, during the height of cancel culture,
we would have both been saying there's zero chance she
could win.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Now, I'm not implying by any of.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
That that I that I have a lot of sympathy
for what she said, but not all of it was
as heinous as what you described. Like, there's a bunch
of stuff where she talks about Islam being incompatible.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
With Western values.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And certainly the radical version of Islam, as you know,
as embodied by Iran and their proxies, is incompatible with
Western values. It doesn't mean every Muslim I can't be
compatible with Western values.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
She said a lot of stuff that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Ranges from the conservative to the right wing nut.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, she covered the gamut. I don't think that she's
conservative on paper. And you know she was critical of
George Floyd. That certainly shouldn't be off limits to be
critical of someone with the track record he had prior
to his untimely death. But you know, this does feel
like canceled culture circa twenty twenty twenty one. It doesn't
feel like what's going on today. I know there's been
(03:34):
a loosening. Yeah, the unofficial regulations. We've seen the return
of ros We've seen comedians who have been canceled come back.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
We've seen Dave Chappelle endure.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
And survive and thrive after a significant culture cancel culture attack.
That includes JK Rowling, that includes Joe Rogan. So we're
living in a different time, but it does feel like
a throwback. And by the way, there are other people
who hate Amelia Perez for different reasons. They thought they
it's a good representation of the trans community. They think
it's they weren't enough Mexican talent involved with the creation
(04:06):
of the film.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So this movie is a powder keg right now.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
So you see, you think it feels more like old school,
which means four or five years ago cancel culture than
you think it feels like that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
It does to me.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
And the one thing that's notable to me is that listen,
I covered the media, and I covered the entertainment media aggressively,
and usually when there's a story that is inconvenient to
their narratives, they either ignore it, or they soft pedal it,
or they drag their feet. This one they jumped on immediately,
and it's like a dog with a bone. They won't
let it go. And I'm curious about that as well,
(04:44):
because this is a trans performer who could make history
and Oscars by being the first trans actress to win
Best Actress, and that is a historic style achievement that
usually the progressive Hollywood community would love. And you could
argue maybe that's why Gascon got somebody in the film
got so many nominations, but not now right now, the
(05:05):
chance that the film's chances seem to be in free fault.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Well, so you know what, this reminds me of a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
And I'm gonna I'm gonna overgeneralize somewhat, but I've often
said other people have often said that to the left,
thinking for example about Clarence Thomas, you can't be black
if you're conservative, right, And and Joe Biden made some
comments along you know this, this kind of thing like
(05:32):
if you don't know who you're gonna vote for in
this election, then you're not black, right. And similarly, maybe
not quite as much, but with with women also, there's
sort of been expected to be liberal and even these
folks who care about these superficial things like skin color
and gender, these immutable characteristics, if you don't and that
(05:53):
normally they would love you because you're black, right, but
clearly that's not primary for them. If you're not on
board with correct thinking, then you're not black anymore, or
in this case, you're not trans anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
No, it's an interesting comparison, and I mostly agree, and
yet that's not what's happening now. And often when it
comes to trans rights, trans would would lap progressivism.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Like JK.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Rowling is very progressive. She's been critical of Trump, she's
been pro a feminist, you know, over the years, her
politics are on the left pretty consistently so. But when
she was a little critical of elements of the trans
community and not being me not being cruel, but you
just saying I don't know about this, the knives came out.
And she's really been under attacked for about forty years
(06:44):
now or maybe even five. So yet this is a
trans performer who could be historic and all those protections,
those cultural protections, have been stripped away.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I'm fascinated by the case. It's very interesting.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
And again, at the end of the day, if you
liked her performance in the movie, you should think that
she should win.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Okay, last thing, and then we're gonna have ninety seconds
for the other story. Before this stuff broke what would
you have said?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
We were Carla.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Gascoyne's odds of winning the Best Actress oscar And now,
what do you think the odds are?
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I think they were pretty good going into this. The
film has thirteen nominations. As a momentum there, the competition
is not I mean, listen to me more. Maybe the
favorite now, I don't think this. You know, some years
is one actress or actor you think that's a locke.
I don't think it's that way this year. So I
think that Gascon had a fairly good chance. Now I
don't think she has any chance.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, I was gonna say, I was gonna say fifty
percent before, maybe a little more, and ten percent now,
But after talking to you, I think ten percent now
might be too high.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I think that's generous. I think ten percent is fair.
Ten that's pretty slim.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, okay, let's do one other story. We got a
little over a minute. So there's this crazy lawsuit going
on between Blake Lively and Justin Valdoni. I've never heard
of Justin Valdoni, and I only know that Blake Lively
is married to Deadpool. But I've caught a little bit
of this news as it's going on, and at the
(08:18):
beginning of the lawsuit, it kind of seemed like, you know,
creepy guy making moves on hot chick. And now as
more news comes out, I feel like she's starting to
look a little worse and he's starting to look a
little better.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But you're paying much closer attention. So what do you think.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I'm with you all the way on this.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It feels like some of the more allured allegations that
she has been making have encountered with no when you
have said this, this is actually what happened, And it
seemed very, if not innocent, very modest at best. You know,
would a fairly unknown actor director pray on it and
(09:00):
actress who's very famous and married to someone who's a superstar,
Ryan Reynolds. That seems unlikely but certainly does happen in Hollywood.
But the leaks, the war, the lawsuits, I think this
is actually would make a pretty compelling movie when it's
all said and done. But I feel like every day
there's a new revelation that says, oh wait, I thought
it was this way, Maybe it's that way. So I
don't want to weigh in weigh in, but I do
feel like what you said sounds right at the moment
(09:23):
that he's been airing enough dirty laundry here that maybe
it isn't what we think.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, and like you said, it will be.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Somebody will make a mini series out of it, for sure,
for sure. And yeah, I'm trying to remember who who's
behind the movie that they were making.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Was it a big studio?
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Was it Netflix? Do you remember who's the movie they did?
I don't remember, you know, I don't remember. The studio
wasn't Netflix. But the irony is that it was an
original movie. They came out last summer. Yeah, and it
was a huge hit.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
It wasn't a sequel, it wasn't a remake.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
There's about a woman undergoing domestic violence and it was
a great story until has happened?
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Interesting? All right?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Christian Toto is the proprietor of the Hollywood in Toto podcast.
Whatever your podcast app is, just go look for Hollywood
in Toto and subscribe. It's well worth your time, super fun, entertaining, enjoyable,
and you'll learn some things about stuff that I actually
don't talk about very much. So it's a bonus that
way too. Christian, Thanks for your time is always great.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
To talk to you, ah my pleasure,
Let's do something very different.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm so pleased to welcome back to the show my
good friend Christian Toto. He is the proprietor of the
Hollywood in Toto podcast. Go look that up and subscribe
wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Hollywood in Toto.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's t t O and Christian, as you well know,
is one of the nation's few right of center media
analysts and critics and.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Just an all around good guy. So Hi Christian, good
to see you.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
The few, the proud, and thelowly. Yes, thanks thanks for
having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Indeed, all right, So there's two topics that I want
to go over with you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
And just for the record, you care about this stuff
a lot more than I do. But as Hollywood stuff goes,
I find both of these at least a little bit interesting,
which is a lot more interesting than I usually find
Hollywood stuff. So let's let's talk about this actress, Carlo
Sophia Gascone.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
What's up with her and Twitter? And who?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Well, she was the star of Amelia Perez and she
is nominated for Best Actress. She's the first trans performer
to get such an honor, and there was some talk
that she might be the favorite in that category, and
then a journalist resurfaced some of Gascone's old tweets, and
they are sometimes problematic and sometimes head scratchingly obtuse. One
(01:24):
seemed to down pedal Hitler's atrocities.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I'll just put it that way.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
They're going to go go google all the posts themselves,
and it's turned the entire Oscar campaign into a nightmare.
Netflix is backpedaling from this particular performer. I think the
film's chance is at a Best Picture nomination. Are going
away certainly Best Actress as a bye bye.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Situation right now?
Speaker 4 (01:48):
And you know, there's so much to tackle with this story,
but maybe we start with should it matter?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I mean, certainly it's bad publicity.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
But if Gascone's performance is the best of the year
in the female category and we could put aside the
trans debate for now, shouldn't she win?
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I mean, look, this is this is the world we
live in now, right And the fact, by the way,
the fact that you and I are talking about this
as if there's still a chance she could win, even
if it's a lower chance than before, and you might
think the chance is very low, but it's still probably
not zero.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
They're like.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
A few years ago, during the height of cancel culture,
we would have both been saying there's zero chance she
could win.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Now, I'm not implying by any of.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
That that I that I have a lot of sympathy
for what she said, but not all of it was
as heinous as what you described. Like, there's a bunch
of stuff where she talks about Islam being incompatible.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
With Western values.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And certainly the radical version of Islam, as you know,
as embodied by Iran and their proxies, is incompatible with
Western values. It doesn't mean every Muslim I can't be
compatible with Western values.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
She said a lot of stuff that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Ranges from the conservative to the right wing nut.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Yeah, she covered the gamut. I don't think that she's
conservative on paper. And you know she was critical of
George Floyd. That certainly shouldn't be off limits to be
critical of someone with the track record he had prior
to his untimely death. But you know, this does feel
like canceled culture circa twenty twenty twenty one. It doesn't
feel like what's going on today. I know there's been
(03:34):
a loosening. Yeah, the unofficial regulations. We've seen the return
of ros We've seen comedians who have been canceled come back.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
We've seen Dave Chappelle endure.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
And survive and thrive after a significant culture cancel culture attack.
That includes JK Rowling, that includes Joe Rogan. So we're
living in a different time, but it does feel like
a throwback. And by the way, there are other people
who hate Amelia Perez for different reasons. They thought they
it's a good representation of the trans community. They think
it's they weren't enough Mexican talent involved with the creation
(04:06):
of the film.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
So this movie is a powder keg right now.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
So you see, you think it feels more like old school,
which means four or five years ago cancel culture than
you think it feels like that.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
It does to me.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
And the one thing that's notable to me is that listen,
I covered the media, and I covered the entertainment media aggressively,
and usually when there's a story that is inconvenient to
their narratives, they either ignore it, or they soft pedal it,
or they drag their feet. This one they jumped on immediately,
and it's like a dog with a bone. They won't
let it go. And I'm curious about that as well,
(04:44):
because this is a trans performer who could make history
and Oscars by being the first trans actress to win
Best Actress, and that is a historic style achievement that
usually the progressive Hollywood community would love. And you could
argue maybe that's why Gascon got somebody in the film
got so many nominations, but not now right now, the
(05:05):
chance that the film's chances seem to be in free fault.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Well, so you know what, this reminds me of a
little bit.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
And I'm gonna I'm gonna overgeneralize somewhat, but I've often
said other people have often said that to the left,
thinking for example about Clarence Thomas, you can't be black
if you're conservative, right, And and Joe Biden made some
comments along you know this, this kind of thing like
(05:32):
if you don't know who you're gonna vote for in
this election, then you're not black, right. And similarly, maybe
not quite as much, but with with women also, there's
sort of been expected to be liberal and even these
folks who care about these superficial things like skin color
and gender, these immutable characteristics, if you don't and that
(05:53):
normally they would love you because you're black, right, but
clearly that's not primary for them. If you're not on
board with correct thinking, then you're not black anymore, or
in this case, you're not trans anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
No, it's an interesting comparison, and I mostly agree, and
yet that's not what's happening now. And often when it
comes to trans rights, trans would would lap progressivism.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Like JK.
Speaker 4 (06:24):
Rowling is very progressive. She's been critical of Trump, she's
been pro a feminist, you know, over the years, her
politics are on the left pretty consistently so. But when
she was a little critical of elements of the trans
community and not being me not being cruel, but you
just saying I don't know about this, the knives came out.
And she's really been under attacked for about forty years
(06:44):
now or maybe even five. So yet this is a
trans performer who could be historic and all those protections,
those cultural protections, have been stripped away.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
I'm fascinated by the case. It's very interesting.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
And again, at the end of the day, if you
liked her performance in the movie, you should think that
she should win.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Okay, last thing, and then we're gonna have ninety seconds
for the other story. Before this stuff broke what would
you have said?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
We were Carla.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Gascoyne's odds of winning the Best Actress oscar And now,
what do you think the odds are?
Speaker 4 (07:20):
I think they were pretty good going into this. The
film has thirteen nominations. As a momentum there, the competition
is not I mean, listen to me more. Maybe the
favorite now, I don't think this. You know, some years
is one actress or actor you think that's a locke.
I don't think it's that way this year. So I
think that Gascon had a fairly good chance. Now I
don't think she has any chance.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah, I was gonna say, I was gonna say fifty
percent before, maybe a little more, and ten percent now,
But after talking to you, I think ten percent now
might be too high.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I think that's generous. I think ten percent is fair.
Ten that's pretty slim.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, okay, let's do one other story. We got a
little over a minute. So there's this crazy lawsuit going
on between Blake Lively and Justin Valdoni. I've never heard
of Justin Valdoni, and I only know that Blake Lively
is married to Deadpool. But I've caught a little bit
of this news as it's going on, and at the
(08:18):
beginning of the lawsuit, it kind of seemed like, you know,
creepy guy making moves on hot chick. And now as
more news comes out, I feel like she's starting to
look a little worse and he's starting to look a
little better.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
But you're paying much closer attention. So what do you think.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I'm with you all the way on this.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
It feels like some of the more allured allegations that
she has been making have encountered with no when you
have said this, this is actually what happened, And it
seemed very, if not innocent, very modest at best. You know,
would a fairly unknown actor director pray on it and
(09:00):
actress who's very famous and married to someone who's a superstar,
Ryan Reynolds. That seems unlikely but certainly does happen in Hollywood.
But the leaks, the war, the lawsuits, I think this
is actually would make a pretty compelling movie when it's
all said and done. But I feel like every day
there's a new revelation that says, oh wait, I thought
it was this way, Maybe it's that way. So I
don't want to weigh in weigh in, but I do
feel like what you said sounds right at the moment
(09:23):
that he's been airing enough dirty laundry here that maybe
it isn't what we think.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, and like you said, it will be.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Somebody will make a mini series out of it, for sure,
for sure. And yeah, I'm trying to remember who who's
behind the movie that they were making.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Was it a big studio?
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Was it Netflix? Do you remember who's the movie they did?
I don't remember, you know, I don't remember. The studio
wasn't Netflix. But the irony is that it was an
original movie. They came out last summer. Yeah, and it
was a huge hit.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
It wasn't a sequel, it wasn't a remake.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
There's about a woman undergoing domestic violence and it was
a great story until has happened?
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Interesting? All right?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Christian Toto is the proprietor of the Hollywood in Toto podcast.
Whatever your podcast app is, just go look for Hollywood
in Toto and subscribe. It's well worth your time, super fun, entertaining, enjoyable,
and you'll learn some things about stuff that I actually
don't talk about very much. So it's a bonus that
way too. Christian, Thanks for your time is always great.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
To talk to you, ah my pleasure,
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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