When the stars are doing the stargazing
LOS ANGELES— Hey, Siri, so tell me: where are the Beautiful People?
It was the first Sunday in March and the last hurrah of a season (the awards sort). And really, I hardly needed a voiceactivated PA to get to the bottom of things.
There’s Caitlyn Jenner, looking like a robin eyeing an earthworm, while holding a clutch that has the name “CAITLYN” scribbled on it. There’s Allison Janney FaceTiming with someone in the dark, as she shows off her just-nabbed Oscar. Naomi Campbell stalks the room. Mindy Kaling spools a story. Margot Robbie gives a good cameo. Monica Lewinsky comes to me, 6 o’clock, passing right by Drake, as it happens. Jon Hamm gropes for just the right mot juste.
Where are we? The Vanity Fair Oscar party, the ultimate snow globe, of course; the party where you’re likely to take every famous person who’s around and, well, shake. Held once again in a built-to-suite, inside-outside aerie designed by Basil Walter Architects, encompassing the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, it’s as always the annual Numero Uno destination for people from the worlds of arts, tech, fashion, sports, business and — of course — those who pretend to be other people for a living (including, last but not least, pretend serial killers, like Darren Criss, whom I encounter doing the robot on the dance floor in the more intimate round room, in the back).
The name of the game, as I’ve noticed from many years of covering this party: stars watching other stars (because as Anjelica Huston once explained — and who I spied this night — “Nobody likes a celebrity more than a celebrity. They’re fascinated by the genre”). A whole party full of people, alas, who’ve either been clues in the New York Times crossword puzzle, hosted SNL or been name-checked on The Simpsons.
B-I-N-G-O: one of the stars of the moment, 43-year-old Sarah Paulson, making her first Vanity Fair carpet debut with 75-year-old Holland Taylor, her love of several years now. “Our relationship,” as she confessed in an interview recently, “represents a certain amount of hope and risk … maybe it encourages others to make brave choices. What else can I say? We love each other.”
B-I-N-G-O, too: This often being just the kind of party you’re likely to run into someone shimmying with a little golden statuette, it’s where I found a circle parting, red-sealike, when another woman of a certain age got down, down, down — doing a twirl, among other moves — with a younger gent. It was Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, both fresh from Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor wins earlier that eve. McDormand was giving some major McAerobics, indeed.
If there seemed to be a case of steam-loose-letting at work, who could blame ’em? With an awards season that’s seemed longer than most — both because the Oscars were pushed forward because of the Olympics and because of the #MeToo mushroom cloud that has seized the industry — it’s been a remarkable stretch, all right.
Indeed, what a difference a year makes since attending my last Vanity Fair Oscar bash. A year ago, not only was Harvey Weinstein still king, but O.J. Simpson was still in prison, Meghan Markle a mere TV actress and Graydon Carter commandeered the VF masthead.
Making the rounds at this party, accepting accolades, was not only journalist Ronan Farrow, who in part blew up the Weinstein story last year (“the credit goes to the women brave enough to come forward,” he told me), but also Vanity Fair’s newly christened editor-in-chief, Radhika Jones (the first new one in a quartercentury), who was looking bang-up in a Prabal Gurung number, and whose first editor’s letter in the latest issue likely sums up her ethos: “I hope you’ll find stories that you didn’t even know you’ve been waiting for.”
It’s a principle that could be applied to any shard of conversation one happens to overhear at this party, as I made my way around. Like when I witnessed Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, colliding with French mogul François-Henri Pinault as the latter’s wife, Salma Hayek, was introduced to the other’s. “Have you met MacKenzie?” asked Bezos. Moguls, they’re just like us. Sweet, sweet shots of serotonin flowed through this party, as did the de rigueur In-N-Out burgers (an Oscar night fixture at Vanity Fair). Accounted for, too: everyone from Joan Collins to Janelle Monae to Gillian Flynn. Halle Berry and Spike Lee hung out. Quincy Jones, we’re not worthy. Watch as Adam Levine and Adam Rippon walk into a room, as do Emma Watson and Emma Stone. Sarah Silverman, what’s up?
“I’m either an old millennial or a really young Gen-X,” someone was saying. Near them, a conversation had splintered about Barbra Streisand’s recently cloned dog. Even nearer, I ran into the white-suited Timothée Chalamet, definitely one of the comets of this star-making season, and whom I first met at the Toronto International Film Festival in September (at which point, I’d written he was this year’s Lupita Nyong’o in terms of insta-stars). “I can’t believe everything that’s happened,” the young lad told me. Laura Dern — a model of self-containment — was behind us. In a corner, I spotted Allison Williams greeting Greta Gerwig with the shrewd opener, “Well, look at you!” (Which I’ve decided will be my opening greeting for everybody from now on, too.)
As far as decompressions go, there were a few. People seemed really psyched about 89-year-old James Ivory winning his first Oscar (for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name) after a lifetime of heart-piercing work. (“It’s about time,” a major producer told me.) And, likewise, the fact that Jordan Peele is the first African-American to win the Best Original Screenplay award for Get Out (he was mobbed when he arrived at the party).
Then there was Gary Oldman, his bowtie undone and hanging loosely from his collar, who I noticed was smiling the smile of a winner, but also one of perceptible awards-season fatigue. The man just crowned Best Actor at long last is, after all, the same bloke, who once said in an interview, “I don’t go to parties. I don’t covet the Oscar. I don’t want any of that. I don’t go out. I just have dinner at home every night with my kids. Being famous, that’s a whole other career. And I haven’t got any energy for it.”
Statuette in hand, standing at the Vanity Fair affair, he’d evidently found the energy, after all.