Vanity Fair magazine’s iconic Oscar party may be on the move again. And this time out of West Hollywood.
Last year the event moved from the Sunset Tower Hotel, where it had been held since 2009, to a parking at Sunset Plaza. Now E!’s Marc Malkin reports that Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter felt moving the party from the paradise that is the Sunset Tower to the parking lot behind the Sunset Plaza shopping mall on the Sunset Strip may have been a mistake.
Vanity Fair moved the party in the hope that it could accommodate more people in the Sunset Plaza parking lot that there was room for at Sunset Tower. The event’s typical guest list now includes 1,000 celebrities and motion picture industry powers.
The Sunset Plaza location, which is home to restaurants such as Clafoutis and Le Petit Four and shops such as Calypso St. Barth and Nicole Miller, offered a sweeping view of Los Angeles. But the event caused problems for some of those local businesses, given that it required the closing of one lane of Sunset Boulevard for ten hours and eliminated all parking for diners and shoppers.
TheWrap reports that Vanity Fair representatives now are scouting possible locations in Beverly Hills for the event, which next year will take place on Feb. 22.
If the party were to leave West Hollywood, that would complicate life for the celebrity chauffeurs, who have been able in the past to make a quick drive north from the earlier Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Awards Party nearby at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.
The Vanity Fair Oscar party is the successor to one launched in April 1964 by Irving “Swifty” Lazar and his wife Mary. Lazar’s Oscar event moved from a small dinner at the Bistro in Beverly Hills to a one-time staging at Warner LeRoy’s Tavern on the Green in New York City in 1977, eventually settling at Spago in 1985. The party went dark with Lazar’s death in 1993. Steve Tisch and Graydon Carter picked up the reins with a party at Morton’s the next year. When Morton’s closed in 2007 it was moved to the Sunset Tower, whose owner, Jeff Klein, is co-owner with Graydon Carter of New York City’s Monkey Bar.
i knew swifty lazar, a wonderful man, generous spirit and boy, could he throw a party, be it 5 people or 500.
it was always special to sit with him in ‘his’ booth at the sunset hamburger hamlet.
it was a who’s who of classy hollywood that dropped by for a visit.
there all pretenders after swifty passed.
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