Am I the only one who thinks Vanity Fair’s hedgerow-topiary logo is getting, well, too familiar?
Whenever I tell people in New York I’m “going to the Oscars,”
they often think I’m actually going to the Academy Awards presentation. I did once attend the ceremony (regrettably—it is extremely boring, especially during the commercials, when you sit there like an idiot waiting for the show to come back on until all of a sudden everyone sits up straight and stops picking their noses). But to me “going to the Oscars” is a generic term, like “going to Magic” (as menswear people say about their big trade show) or “going to Comdex” (as tech people used to say about theirs).
And just like those other events, not everyone who is “going to” the show has to drop by the convention center.
While I’ve given up explaining that I’m simply going out to L.A. for a few cocktail parties, the truth is that it becomes more and more like a trade show every year. Everyone talks about where hey’re staying and what parties they’re going to. There are lots of large, clumsy shopping bags. And just like at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it is impossible to get a taxi.
What distinguishes this trade show is that no matter who you are at the Oscars, you are never satisfied. There is always someone above you.
Vanity Fair makes this clear on the parking passes for its party, which clearly dictate arrival times on the half hour. Dum-dums who think a fancy limo will allow them to squeeze in earlier should know that VF’s arrival sentries—as battle-hardened as our on-repeat-duty armed forces in Iraq—are used to attempted ambushes. Pull this stunt, and you learn there’s a whole road lane set aside for you, kind of a limo purgatory, where you have to wait. What’s worse is that when your allowed entry time does come, you may be forced to abandon ship and Jimmy Choo it a half-mile.
Now, the Oscar car service routine is the one great equalizer. Everyone spends most of the big night in the back of their car on a cell phone. It’s just what you do.
Just as L.A. people spend most of their workweek driving back and forth from some traffic-clotted spot to another (in this city, a three-hour lunch means two hours on the 405, with 45 minutes to inhale your Cobb salad), on O-night, the Corinthian leather is man’s best friend. You’d think the heavy hitters
would grow weary of the time wasted sitting in a car, but this is a see-and-be-seen town, where if you don’t make the rounds, you get Tobey-ed, which is the new slang for being labeled fat or in rehab (sorry, Mr. Maguire).
So you get in the limo line and wait, fingering your stack of parking passes and D.O.E. contact sheets (that’s “day of event”—for some reason I was able to do 10 years of Oscar parties without learning this little acronym), wishing they were just one color-level higher in status.
This year, close-to-the-ground but very he-man-ish, Tom Cruise decided to buck this trend by arriving on a Ducati motorcycle and going in Mortons’ backdoor. But as usual, his calculated “real-guyness” was belied by a hundred walkie-talkie warnings that this “spontaneous, nonchalant” arrival would happen in “11 minutes.”
Do I dare say the Vanity Fair party needs an update? Am I the only one who seems to think the colored pin spots, the hedgerow-topiary logo, the down-to-earth In & Out burgers, and the nifty little cloth-covered notebooks all seem kind of, well, familiar? Does familiarity breed contempt? Are these questions that dare not speak their name? (I admit, one of those notebooks has never made into these grubby little paws. They are most sensationally employed by Dominick Dunne, who carries what must be last year’s model, beat-up and scrawled with authentic reporter note-taking.)
Maybe it’s just too much time on my hands in the back of a car making conversation with my third Armenian/Russian driver that brings such nasty thoughts to mind.
Or maybe it’s my experience at “Soho House West,” the one-week-only Tinseltown outpost of that well-known London and New York private and fashionable institution, Soho House.
Getting to the venue required taking a shuttle from a parking garage. Here, an affected-sounding host behind a hard-to-find greeting stand seemed annoyed when I popped my head out of a car window to ask if I was at the right place. He did not volunteer that my driver (in this case my nonArmenian/Russian pal, Bob) should not, unless he intended to wait for me, enter the parking garage entrance where he was stationed, or Bob would be stuck in parking service hell for 20 minutes. When the next two guests pulled up and seemed frustrated by the same routine, I inquired whether a sign might be useful. Mr. Affectation pointed dismissively to an unlit, foam core poster leaning on the grass visible only to people who had already passed the check-in point.
With no shuttle yet in sight, I turned my attention (as custom dictates) to le cell phone, hoping to minimize the annoyances my yet-to-arrive lady friend Denise would have to endure in the shuttle shuffle. So I asked Mr. Affectation the cross street where I was waiting so I could properly direct her. Annoyed at the interruption, he informed me that it was Laurel Canyon, the only problem being that he was wrong. It was Laurel Avenue we were killing time on, not the one-block-west Laurel Canyon. This was his fourth night at this streetside podium (where I had now waited fifteen minutes and learned his whole life story, which, despite the accent, apparently does not include Great Britain). So I was flummoxed as to how anyone could be both so completely pretentious and incompetent as to spend four nights on a street corner and not learn its correct name.
Must I go through the obvious next steps? Denise got lost, I went to the corner, learned the close-but-no-cigar street name, waved her down, pointed out the bus stop, and then cooled my heels as she went through the garage routine. Does it go without saying that my relationship with Mr. Affectation went downhill from here?
Should I be surprised by this level of lameness? Apparently not, because apparently these Soho House folks broke the cardinal rule of trying to use the Oscar name in a commercial title—originally coining their one-week rental the “Soho House Oscar Villa”—without paying a licensing fee, something even the most error-prone PR dingbat knows not to do.
To be fair, once we arrived, a half-hour later, the view was nice.
Since so much back-seating made me restless, I’m going to speed things up.
OSCAR SUITES: I’m sad and secretly pleased that the scene I used to play heavily in, the luxury suites, seems definitively past its prime. Glad to see old Angela Bassett still making the freebie rounds though.
BEST WARM-UP EVENT: From what I hear, this definitely goes to the Motion Picture Fund event, held Saturday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I lamely didn’t get to. Won’t make the same mistake twice.
WHERE DOES YOUNG HOLLYWOOD GO?: I am ashamed to admit that despite my advancing years, I attended two “young Hollywood” events on the big night. The first, a viewing party sponsored by Origins cosmetics at Citrus restaurant, offered guests the clever option of arriving fresh-faced and having the lacquer applied during the telecast; doing so would allow one’s pores that much more breathing time. Their “peace of mind” gumballs were much appreciated by those tacky enough, like myself, to chew gum. Then young Hollywood was supposedly racing off to Esquire’s viewing party and benefit for AIDS Project Los Angeles, staged at the Abbey on Robertson and Santa Monica boulevards, in a West Coast neighborhood equivalent to Chelsea. While I didn’t get to see most of the promised young Hollywood—like Mischa Barton and Ryan Seacrest—I did get ample opportunities to smoke. This indoor-outdoor setting had tropical-style fans and open-air tenting that meant you did not have to feel like a leper while having a cigarette. As if to reinforce the “free-smoke” vibe, smoking God and definitely older-Hollywood member Tommy Chong (remember Cheech and Chong?) was on hand. Encouraging. No reefer madness, though.
WATCH OUT NEXT YEAR FOR: Argyle Hotel designer Paul Fortune has only worked partial magic on this Deco hotel, formerly the St. James Club, which was recently taken over by New York hotelier Jeff Klein (he of the City Club Hotel). But the tan, Ultrasuede, sample-of-things-to-come banquettes on display were fabulous, the staff uniformly well trained, and V.I.P.s like celebrity shutterbug Patrick McMullan already gave the lobby a frisson of buzz. I’ll be back.
SPECIAL THANKS TO MY SIDEKICK: No, not the kind that Paris Hilton reminds herself to buy birth control on (she apparently prefers the morning-after “kill pill” to the old fashioned kind of tablets, I’m told). I had a real live person, phoning, faxing, and making all the above seem, well, effortless. Thanks, Lois.
Posted 03.02.05
Photos: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images (Vanity Fair exterior), courtesy of Esquire (ice bar)
they often think I’m actually going to the Academy Awards presentation. I did once attend the ceremony (regrettably—it is extremely boring, especially during the commercials, when you sit there like an idiot waiting for the show to come back on until all of a sudden everyone sits up straight and stops picking their noses). But to me “going to the Oscars” is a generic term, like “going to Magic” (as menswear people say about their big trade show) or “going to Comdex” (as tech people used to say about theirs).
And just like those other events, not everyone who is “going to” the show has to drop by the convention center.
While I’ve given up explaining that I’m simply going out to L.A. for a few cocktail parties, the truth is that it becomes more and more like a trade show every year. Everyone talks about where hey’re staying and what parties they’re going to. There are lots of large, clumsy shopping bags. And just like at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it is impossible to get a taxi.
What distinguishes this trade show is that no matter who you are at the Oscars, you are never satisfied. There is always someone above you.
Vanity Fair makes this clear on the parking passes for its party, which clearly dictate arrival times on the half hour. Dum-dums who think a fancy limo will allow them to squeeze in earlier should know that VF’s arrival sentries—as battle-hardened as our on-repeat-duty armed forces in Iraq—are used to attempted ambushes. Pull this stunt, and you learn there’s a whole road lane set aside for you, kind of a limo purgatory, where you have to wait. What’s worse is that when your allowed entry time does come, you may be forced to abandon ship and Jimmy Choo it a half-mile.
Now, the Oscar car service routine is the one great equalizer. Everyone spends most of the big night in the back of their car on a cell phone. It’s just what you do.
Just as L.A. people spend most of their workweek driving back and forth from some traffic-clotted spot to another (in this city, a three-hour lunch means two hours on the 405, with 45 minutes to inhale your Cobb salad), on O-night, the Corinthian leather is man’s best friend. You’d think the heavy hitters
would grow weary of the time wasted sitting in a car, but this is a see-and-be-seen town, where if you don’t make the rounds, you get Tobey-ed, which is the new slang for being labeled fat or in rehab (sorry, Mr. Maguire).
So you get in the limo line and wait, fingering your stack of parking passes and D.O.E. contact sheets (that’s “day of event”—for some reason I was able to do 10 years of Oscar parties without learning this little acronym), wishing they were just one color-level higher in status.
This year, close-to-the-ground but very he-man-ish, Tom Cruise decided to buck this trend by arriving on a Ducati motorcycle and going in Mortons’ backdoor. But as usual, his calculated “real-guyness” was belied by a hundred walkie-talkie warnings that this “spontaneous, nonchalant” arrival would happen in “11 minutes.”
Do I dare say the Vanity Fair party needs an update? Am I the only one who seems to think the colored pin spots, the hedgerow-topiary logo, the down-to-earth In & Out burgers, and the nifty little cloth-covered notebooks all seem kind of, well, familiar? Does familiarity breed contempt? Are these questions that dare not speak their name? (I admit, one of those notebooks has never made into these grubby little paws. They are most sensationally employed by Dominick Dunne, who carries what must be last year’s model, beat-up and scrawled with authentic reporter note-taking.)
Maybe it’s just too much time on my hands in the back of a car making conversation with my third Armenian/Russian driver that brings such nasty thoughts to mind.
Or maybe it’s my experience at “Soho House West,” the one-week-only Tinseltown outpost of that well-known London and New York private and fashionable institution, Soho House.
Getting to the venue required taking a shuttle from a parking garage. Here, an affected-sounding host behind a hard-to-find greeting stand seemed annoyed when I popped my head out of a car window to ask if I was at the right place. He did not volunteer that my driver (in this case my nonArmenian/Russian pal, Bob) should not, unless he intended to wait for me, enter the parking garage entrance where he was stationed, or Bob would be stuck in parking service hell for 20 minutes. When the next two guests pulled up and seemed frustrated by the same routine, I inquired whether a sign might be useful. Mr. Affectation pointed dismissively to an unlit, foam core poster leaning on the grass visible only to people who had already passed the check-in point.
With no shuttle yet in sight, I turned my attention (as custom dictates) to le cell phone, hoping to minimize the annoyances my yet-to-arrive lady friend Denise would have to endure in the shuttle shuffle. So I asked Mr. Affectation the cross street where I was waiting so I could properly direct her. Annoyed at the interruption, he informed me that it was Laurel Canyon, the only problem being that he was wrong. It was Laurel Avenue we were killing time on, not the one-block-west Laurel Canyon. This was his fourth night at this streetside podium (where I had now waited fifteen minutes and learned his whole life story, which, despite the accent, apparently does not include Great Britain). So I was flummoxed as to how anyone could be both so completely pretentious and incompetent as to spend four nights on a street corner and not learn its correct name.
Must I go through the obvious next steps? Denise got lost, I went to the corner, learned the close-but-no-cigar street name, waved her down, pointed out the bus stop, and then cooled my heels as she went through the garage routine. Does it go without saying that my relationship with Mr. Affectation went downhill from here?
Should I be surprised by this level of lameness? Apparently not, because apparently these Soho House folks broke the cardinal rule of trying to use the Oscar name in a commercial title—originally coining their one-week rental the “Soho House Oscar Villa”—without paying a licensing fee, something even the most error-prone PR dingbat knows not to do.
To be fair, once we arrived, a half-hour later, the view was nice.
Since so much back-seating made me restless, I’m going to speed things up.
OSCAR SUITES: I’m sad and secretly pleased that the scene I used to play heavily in, the luxury suites, seems definitively past its prime. Glad to see old Angela Bassett still making the freebie rounds though.
BEST WARM-UP EVENT: From what I hear, this definitely goes to the Motion Picture Fund event, held Saturday night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which I lamely didn’t get to. Won’t make the same mistake twice.
WHERE DOES YOUNG HOLLYWOOD GO?: I am ashamed to admit that despite my advancing years, I attended two “young Hollywood” events on the big night. The first, a viewing party sponsored by Origins cosmetics at Citrus restaurant, offered guests the clever option of arriving fresh-faced and having the lacquer applied during the telecast; doing so would allow one’s pores that much more breathing time. Their “peace of mind” gumballs were much appreciated by those tacky enough, like myself, to chew gum. Then young Hollywood was supposedly racing off to Esquire’s viewing party and benefit for AIDS Project Los Angeles, staged at the Abbey on Robertson and Santa Monica boulevards, in a West Coast neighborhood equivalent to Chelsea. While I didn’t get to see most of the promised young Hollywood—like Mischa Barton and Ryan Seacrest—I did get ample opportunities to smoke. This indoor-outdoor setting had tropical-style fans and open-air tenting that meant you did not have to feel like a leper while having a cigarette. As if to reinforce the “free-smoke” vibe, smoking God and definitely older-Hollywood member Tommy Chong (remember Cheech and Chong?) was on hand. Encouraging. No reefer madness, though.
WATCH OUT NEXT YEAR FOR: Argyle Hotel designer Paul Fortune has only worked partial magic on this Deco hotel, formerly the St. James Club, which was recently taken over by New York hotelier Jeff Klein (he of the City Club Hotel). But the tan, Ultrasuede, sample-of-things-to-come banquettes on display were fabulous, the staff uniformly well trained, and V.I.P.s like celebrity shutterbug Patrick McMullan already gave the lobby a frisson of buzz. I’ll be back.
SPECIAL THANKS TO MY SIDEKICK: No, not the kind that Paris Hilton reminds herself to buy birth control on (she apparently prefers the morning-after “kill pill” to the old fashioned kind of tablets, I’m told). I had a real live person, phoning, faxing, and making all the above seem, well, effortless. Thanks, Lois.
Posted 03.02.05
Photos: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images (Vanity Fair exterior), courtesy of Esquire (ice bar)
![For the after-party, Event Eleven built three 30-foot pagodas and hung 300 lanterns from the ceiling. They also brought in a 20-foot-tall bonsai tree and a variety of 30-foot red maples, along with other greenery and foliage. '[It all] helped create the organic atmosphere and helped transport guests into a gardenlike room,' said Schubert.](https://img.bizbash.com/files/base/bizbash/bzb/image/2024/02/Shogun.41_f.65dba8f23433b.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
