Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
For over 30 years, the Vanity Fair Oscars party has been the place to get photographed after the Academy Awards. Stars like Madonna, Elton John, and Beyoncé all host their own fêtes, but it’s the Vanity Fair carpet that has historically produced the best photos. Well, until this year. Someone forgot to bring the good-lighting setup on Sunday, leading to a carpet that one guest described as “like a hundred degrees” and a bunch of photos where the most beautiful people in the world look like real humans with pores.
According to a wonderfully gossipy report in The Hollywood Reporter, the lighting fiasco is an unfortunate symptom of the recent regime change at Vanity Fair. Last summer, Condé Nast announced that Vogue’s creative editorial director, Mark Guiducci, would become the global editorial director at Vanity Fair, taking over for Radhika Jones, who spent seven years leading the publication (and throwing its Oscars party). Sources at the magazine who spoke to THR said that the party has been one of Guiducci’s biggest priorities since taking the job and that he wanted to make it even more glamorous by culling the guest list to only the cream of the crop — and, most importantly, changing the venue from the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Amid all the changes to this year’s party, it seems like no one told Guiducci that the real secret to the party’s success was how fabulously the stars were lit on the carpet.
“I’ve been shot at a million parties, but the setup for that party was always sublime,” one frequent attendee told THR. “When you posed for the paps at the VF gala, even the ugliest stars knew they’d come out all right. It was like magic!” This year, however, the LACMA setup fell short — one source said the new lighting was “crazy bright,” while another said it was so hot she was “literally having hot flashes.” “It was just so unforgiving,” another person said. “Like being shot in extremely high-def. You saw a lot of excess pounds and wrinkles that used to be hidden. Nobody wants to be photographed like that!”
One THR source came through with a devastating blind item. “One poor actress looked like a Diane Arbus character,” they said. “She was on her phone looking at her pictures and shrieking at her publicist. I heard that she went home and cried herself to sleep. Nobody has heard from her since!”
Despite the nightmare situation outside — which also involved influencer Jake Shane conducting a string of widely criticized red-carpet interviews — it sounds like things went over well at the party itself. Even though there were concerns that Guiducci was having “a nervous breakdown” for the first hour, by the end of the night, he was “canoodling with his boyfriend at the bar.” Maybe next year, they can avoid any mental anguish by just hiring whoever does the lighting for that one French talk show. Problem solved.
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