My night partying with Leo’s gang

As I pull up outside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, valets appear out of nowhere just as the cars behind start to honk. I’m soon following mypublicist escort at a fast clip down tented corridors, passing headshots two metres tall of previous Oscar winners, half of whom are on the guestlist. A giant Oscar trimmed out of a hedge looms into view, then we’re on the red carpet: a long line of international television crews rising to a packed firing squad of stills photographers detonating flashbulb after flashbulb.

Is there anyone in particular to look out for, I wonder, as we scurry behind a famous person I can’t place and plunge into the party. Rachel, the publicist who brings me across this final threshold, smiles. “Well, Leonardo DiCaprio is right there. That looks a good place to start.”

The man whose long-awaited Oscar win has just made history as the most tweeted Academy Awards moment ever is just inside the door, hugging and backslapping Chris Rock, whose opening monologue excoriating Hollywood on race has been the night’s other main talking point. Guests in evening dress swarm around them, abandoning dignity to snap away on their iPhones, gawping like children visiting a zoo for the first time. Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul formerly known as Puff Daddy, is hovering on the edge of the group but nobody pays him any attention.

I barrel past them, dodge round Adrien Brody, who’s wearing an open-neck shirt, and find myself standing by another sofa where John McEnroe is deep in conversation with, I think, Rachel McAdams, who was nominated for best supporting actress. Doubling back, I sidestep Sylvester Stallone and his wife Jennifer Flavin then squeeze round the singer John Legend and maybe Pharrell Williams until a huge suited back blocks my path. Obviously, it’s Vince Vaughn sharing a joke with Jeremy Renner.

Off to the gents’ to scribble some of this down and there’s an unshaven Jon Hamm drying his hands at the sink. He briefly looks straight at me — just in case I turn out to be a megawatt celebrity too. He looks away pretty quickly with a sheepish grin.

Leonardo DiCaprio with his mother, Irmelin Indenbirken, at the Oscars ceremony

REX FEATURES

So it’s back to the main room, which is really a very glorified glass shed with a spectacular 80ft chandelier hanging above the festivities. There are sofas on three sides, a dancefloor crammed with people and a long bar, which I can reach only by taking a detour round Justin Timberlake.

Looking back towards where I came in, I notice Chris Rock almost on his own, sending a text message. The hulking character near him that I thought might be a bodyguard doesn’t stop me so I shake the ceremony host’s hand and tell him what a brilliant job he did. I don’t even have to exaggerate. “Oh, thank you”, he says with a tight smile. Was he still writing up till the day itself? He smiles a little more broadly. “Yeah, the George Clooney stuff? That was probably the last one I did.”

At the back of the main space is a smaller circular dining room with wood-panelled walls, diner-style booths with cream suede banquettes and vintage American travel posters above the central bar. Michael Fassbender, collateral damage in DiCaprio’s charge to an Oscar, is yawning on one of the banquettes. Serena Williams in a figure-hugging cream lace dress and gloves is at the centre of a group on the other side. I pass Emily Blunt mock-protesting that something or other “is a joke”.

A fleet of waiters surge into the dining room armed with king prawns and hot dogs for stars who have been starving themselves for months to get in red-carpet shape. I duck between them on to the outside smoking terrace where Michael Sheen and his comedienne girlfriend Sarah Silverman, who made the most risqué award presentation of the night, are chewing the fat with Hamm.

Passing an absurdly tall Charlize Theron, who is laughing heartily, I step into the palm tree-dotted garden, where the best actress nominee Charlotte Rampling is swaying delicately to the sound of Madonna with her hands behind her back. Was she glad to get the controversy caused by her suggesting that a proposed boycott of the Oscars was “racist to whites” out of the way? She was, and she had been gratified to see that the ceremony ended up exploring variations on that theme, she adds. At 70, it was her first nomination. Dropping in from her adopted home country of France, was Rampling too a little bit dazzled by the Hollywood star wattage in the room? She looks confused. “No, not dazzled: they seem to be part of my family.”

Pete Docter, the brilliant gangling director of the animated films Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out appears clutching his Oscar for best animated feature for the latter. He lets me hold the trophy. It’s a redder gold than I’d imagined and is, as everybody always says, remarkably heavy. He’d won before with Up — how was this different?

“The second time is better because you’re conscious that you have to try to take it all in,” Docter says. Even so, he says, looking at his wife: “I remember kissing you and then, what? Forgetting almost everything I’d prepared to say. You get up on stage and there’s Steven Spielberg staring right back at you.” That’s not normal for him. “We’re animators and we like to spend our time in darkened rooms with three or four people.”

A little farther on I find another Oscar, this time in the hands of a Brit: Sara Bennett, part of a team of four who won the best visual effects prize for the superb British sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, beating Star Wars: The Force Awakens in perhaps the biggest upset of the night. She looks glazed and can’t quite believe where she is. “Why do you think we’re out here, smoking and drinking?” she says. The weirdness of a night among the Hollywood elite hasn’t held her back, though. “I’ve got pictures with Jake Gyllenhaal, Serena Williams and Justin Timberlake. He didn’t want to but I thought f*** it, I’ve just got an Oscar, so I made him.”

Oscars week in LA is packed with parties, including the Diane von Furstenberg luncheon for female nominees, the Oscar Wilde awards recognising Irish film and compered by the director JJ Abrams, the Cadillac cocktail party at the Chateau Marmont and the Britain’s Film is GREAT Reception on Friday co-hosted by the British consul-general and by the best actor nominee Eddie Redmayne. Yet for more than two decades — except 2008 when it was cancelled in solidarity with the Hollywood writers’ strike — the Vanity Fair party has reigned supreme.

Pruning the guest list is part of its secret. Graydon Carter, the magazine’s leonine editor, stresses that who you don’t invite is at least as important as who you do. The only way to guarantee an invitation is to win an Oscar on the night, although Beth Kseniak, Vanity Fair’s executive director of publicity, says she did once allow a former winner to blag their way in with an old Oscar. Equally critical are Kseniak’s rules for the press. Only a select few photographers and print reporters are allowed inside, and the reporters are under witheringly strict orders to mingle and observe but not to take notes, record anything or snap a picture.

The globally famous stars have suffered enough, is the thinking. They deserve a break. “People feel comfortable once they come,” she says. “And they know that everyone who’s anyone will be there.”

Back in the main room the evening is drawing towards a ragged climax. Lady Gaga has arrived at Elton John, David Furnish and Sheryl Crow’s sofa, and a little farther on Alejandro González Iñárritu, the winner of best director for the second year running, is in a time-out style clinch with some of his crew from The Revenant. “This is good times,” he tells them. “Let me tell you — good times.”

Mark Rylance drifts by in his trademark pork pie hat with his best supporting actor statuette under his arm and sails happily into the throng. Emmanuel Lubezki, who has just won a third consecutive cinematography Oscar, rushes towards Ben Affleck who worked with him on the Terrence Malick film To the Wonder. The American kisses the Mexican’s head and puts on a dreadful fake Hispanic accent. “You hava too many Oscaaars,” he jokes.

By now the whole event starts to take on a hallucinogenic quality. Is that really Monica Lewinsky in the black dress near Amy Adams? Yes it is. And who on earth is the peroxide blonde with the dress that seems to be a series of strategically placed scarlet leaves? Ah, Gwen Stefani. Hours later Vanity Fair will send through their list of guests who attended, including a host of people I didn’t manage to spot: Joan Collins, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lawrence, Naomi Campbell, Mary J Blige, Sheryl Sandberg, Roger Federer . . .

Heading for the exit, though, I spot another tennis pro, Serena Williams, taking selfies with a male friend in front of the large Vanity Fai r backdrop. “How do you think Chris Rock did tonight?” I ask. “Did he get his message across about racism and Hollywood?” She takes another selfie, exposing acres of midriff, then looks at me, eyes blank. She takes a deep breath, perhaps hoping I will go away. “I didn’t watch it, I was working. I’m sorry.”

It feels like the right moment to leave but a little later I see Williams again in the queue for the cars. Soon a valet is shouting loudly — “A valet Ford Fusion” — and the sea of famous faces, movers and shakers and fixers and billionaires parts to let me through. I’m pretty sure I’m the only guest going home tonight in a Ford.