Celebrities Start Partying Before the Oscars and Keep Going All Weekend

New York Times

02-03-2025

The billionaire Jeff Bezos sat inside the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Saturday night with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who carried a silver purse in the shape of a spaceship.
Earlier that week Mr. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, had made news for pushing the paper's opinion section to embrace 'personal liberties and free markets.' The section's editor resigned in response. If that was weighing on him, you'd never have known by the convivial rapport he shared with Kim Kardashian.
Both were guests at a pre-Oscars dinner hosted by Chanel and Charles Finch. Ms. Kardashian used a metal fork to pry open a handbag that was roughly the size of an AirPods case. She removed a Ricola lozenge, popped it in her mouth and returned to her conversation with Mr. Bezos.
The room's perimeter was reserved for entertainment royalty. Mick Jagger nudged pink cotton candy floss off his dessert sundae with a spoon. Al Pacino held court in one corner, leaning across the table for an animated discussion with Jeff Goldblum.
In the days leading up to the Oscars, stars wound through an annual succession of events hosted by fashion labels and agencies eager to capitalize on Hollywood's biggest weekend.
'It's a fantasy, magical world,' the actress Lupita Nyong'o said. 'It's nice to escape into that sometimes.'
Party hosts did not seem to agree on what level of escape their festivities should provide from the wildfires that had ravaged the Los Angeles area just months earlier.
On social media Jean Smart and Stephen King had argued that it would be inappropriate for awards season to go on at all. United Talent Agency skipped its pre-Oscars party, instead opting to donate to three wildfire relief organizations, while CAA and WME forged ahead with theirs.
So did the nonprofit organization Women in Film, which went on with its Friday night cocktail party despite the fact that its chief executive, Kirsten Schaffer, had lost her home in the Altadena fire. At a Spanish-style villa in West Hollywood, guests including Cynthia Erivo exchanged compliments over a charcuterie board the size of a foosball table.
Giorgio Armani also hosted a party on Saturday at its cavernous boutique on Rodeo Drive. Adrien Brody, Samuel L. Jackson and Denis Villeneuve maneuvered around the tightly packed store, trying not to crash into glass display cases that housed spear-like pairs of stilettos.
Inside the Polo Lounge, Mr. Goldblum said he wished that more awards shows were like the American Film Institute luncheon, which does not pick individual winners. 'In so many areas, there's competition-entertainment,' he said, 'and maybe it doesn't have to be.'
Leonardo DiCaprio sneaked in late wearing a dark baseball cap. He plucked some French fries from his table, then took a puff from his vape and exhaled smoke in a diagonal plume.
'Ciao,' Mr. DiCaprio said to another attendee, making his way out of the party around 10 p.m.
Other guests swarmed the party's many nominees, including Demi Moore, who brought her daughter Scout LaRue Willis, and Colman Domingo, who chatted on the patio with Mr. Brody, his competition for best actor.
'You guys are amazing,' Mr. Domingo told a group that included the best actress nominee Fernanda Torres.
Ms. Torres said she considered her film, the Brazilian drama 'I'm Still Here,' a 'dark horse' for Sunday's ceremony.
'It's very tough to make people watch the movie,' she said, noting that its Portuguese had been a difficult sell for American viewers. Still, she had poured energy into evangelizing it: 'It's a film that moves people in a very special way.'
By 10:30 p.m., plates of steak au poivre and chicken Parmesan had been cleared away by waiters in white jackets. One by one, Gayle King, Willem Dafoe and Michael Keaton filed out. A younger generation of guests, including Lily-Rose Depp and the sisters Elle and Dakota Fanning, stayed behind to chat in a courtyard full of cigarette smoke.
As the evening wound down, the director Judd Apatow reflected on how his relationship to the Oscars had changed. The ceremony feels a lot like Disneyland, he said: The first few visits are thrilling. 'If you've been going for a very long time, it's still fun but it's not mind blowing,' he continued. 'You can tell that there's a guy inside the Mickey Mouse costume, and it feels a little less magical.'
As the years go by, he said, 'you can tell that Mickey Mouse looks a little old, a little tired.'