Lights Out: Vanity Fair Oscar Party Lighting Was So Bad an Actress Cried Herself to Sleep

Mark Guiducci had one job. One. Don’t screw up the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

Guess what? He screwed up the Vanity Fair Oscar party.

According to a report in The Hollywood Reporter, the whole thing was a mess, from the guest list to the lighting to the carpet — and Hollywood is still talking about it.

To be fair, the new editor came in swinging. Word is he was manic and obsessive over the guest list. Those in the know confirm he’d been “obsessing” over the guest list since day one, reviewing it, according to insiders, something like a “thousand times.” B-listers? Gone. TV stars? Fuhget about it. Media reporters? Are you crazy? Only AAA names would do. His boyfriend, New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh, managed to make the cut. Columnist Maureen Dowd made the cut. But Emma Stone, a sitting Oscar nominee, she was left wondering if she was even on the list. She was. Barely. “It’s so weird,” she said on camera, “even if you’re nominated, it doesn’t mean you can go.”

He also moved the whole thing from its longtime home at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills to LACMA, where guests were promised an exclusive first look at the brand-new David Geffen galleries. The galleries weren’t finished. The party got bumped to a less impressive wing of the museum. Details gurl. Details. Maybe he oughta think about bringing it back to West Hollywood.

Here’s the thing. It’s about the lighting. It’s always ever been and will ever be about the lighting. Not the celebrities. Not the open bar. The lighting. “Meticulously calibrated,” as one longtime fixture described it to THR. Soft, forgiving, engineered to make even, and this is a direct quote, “the ugliest stars” look like they’d stepped out of a magazine. “When you posed for the paps at the VF gala, even the ugliest stars knew they’d come out all right,” they said. “It was like magic.” 

The magic did not make the move to LACMA. This was an epic fail of Hollywood proportions. And, gurl! Gurl! You’re gay! How did you miss the lighting?! All of us queens know — it’s the lighting, boo. 

“It was so crazy-bright there, I felt like I was standing under klieg lights,” one attendee told THR. Another said she genuinely wondered if she’d entered early menopause. “It was like a hundred degrees.” One source put it simply: “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.”

The photos hit TikTok fast. Cruel creators pounced. Some celebrities quietly posted photos from Guy Oseary and Madonna’s party the next morning instead of the VF shots. One unnamed actress — spotted on her phone, shrieking at her publicist on the carpet — went home and cried herself to sleep. “Nobody has heard from her since,” a guest told THR.

The carpet itself didn’t help. The iconic red one was gone. In its place: a gray shag rug that one observer called “Long Island living-room vibes.” Then Domino’s showed up as a sponsor. “When they brought in the pizzas,” the observer said, “it all suddenly came full circle.”

Guiducci, for the record, spent the first hour looking like he was having a nervous breakdown. He rallied. By the end of the night he was in his custom green velvet Savile Row tuxedo, canoodling with his boyfriend at the bar.

Most guests said they’d still go next year. One condition: “Hopefully they won’t hire the lighting designer who did the 405.”

You can check out some of the snaps here.