Mr. Landau: Your thoughts on the Oscar show?
He gives the perfect answer: “Better than some.”
Special Report
85th annual Academy Awards
Oscars: A night of red carpet fashion, Oscar winners, award show moments and Hollywood parties.
All is inanity at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party
Oscars night winners, from Ben Affleck to Anne Hathaway, discuss their big moment onstage. Also, a look at some of the night's big surprises.
A champagne cork pops and a booth full of non-celebrity Oscar winners (sound men, short-film producers) clink glasses and statuettes in a flurry of camera flashes. They whoop. They double over with laughter. They wedge their hand-held golden calves between their thighs. It’s the height of idolatry. Where is our Moses? Who will descend from the Hollywood Hills with tablets of wisdom and shame us for our hedonism?
We spy Catherine O’Hara, who once played an Oscar-hungry actress in a Christopher Guest mockumentary. Catherine O’Hara seems like a real person. Catherine O’Hara will surely have something witty and wise to say about this display of biblical decadence.
“No,” she says.
No?
“Nothing,” she says.
We let the awkward silence compel her to vamp.
“I don’t know that it means anything,” O’Hara says of this party. “I don’t want to say it’s superficial because it’s not. It means different things to different people. The first time I came it was like an actor’s dream. All these faces coming at you” — here she sweeps her white-gloved hands through the air — “ and everyone loves your work and everyone belongs. It’s the opposite of the actor’s nightmare . . . where you don’t remember your lines and you don’t know what you’re doing and no one sees it anyway. It sounds superficial. But it’s not. It’s fun. Because everyone needs superficial fun every now and then.”
She pauses, having arrived at a kind of paradox, then says: “I told you I didn’t have anything to say.”
Honey, you said it all.
We look at the scene with open eyes. The inescapable anthem “We Are Young” drums away. There’s a dusting of Parisienne cigarette ash on the suede couches. Shirts have untucked themselves. Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, the Washington couple who won best documentary short earlier in the evening, pose for a photo with Day-Lewis, his wife Rebecca Miller and their little gold men as if they’re all friends who have worked with each other for years. Hathaway and John Kahrs, winner of best animated short, pay their respects to each other as equals. What Moses O’Hara was saying starts to feel prophetic.
Then, around 1:15 a.m., the temperature starts to drop. What was a hothouse of notoriety and cleavage becomes just an emptying, drafty lounge as attendees air-kiss their way out of the Sunset Tower. The party, at its peak, feels like a grand eternal tradition, but now, on a 3 a.m. walk down littered, liberated Sunset Boulevard, it seems like Rome after the fall, or Brigadoon, where the only list you’re on is your own. Sprinkler systems hiss over this unnatural oasis in the chilly desert night, and we think about something an astronaut once told us.
- Spam
- Obscene
- Duplicate
The Post Most: LifestyleMost-viewed stories,videos, and galleries in the past two hours
Loading...
Comments