Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren at Armani Pre-Oscars Party

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — On the fruits of an intense and monthslong Oscars awards season, Hollywood took up the place it left off earlier than the pandemic and have become a maskless, glittering free-for-all.

Trend labels like Saint Laurent, Chanel and Gucci and powerhouse expertise businesses like CAA competed with tech Goliaths like Apple to attain the perfect eating places, most elegant social gathering areas and the rarest specimens from among the many celeb coterie.

The consensus will not be but in on who gained the race for greatest wingding. Some events had been so scrupulously personal — like CAA’s on the San Vicente Bungalows membership on Friday — that solely megacelebrities like Elon Musk, Leonardo DiCaprio and Taylor Swift had been invited to graze a buffet of roast salmon, pulled pork, rooster curry and mini meringues.

However Hollywood additionally hungrily eats its personal historical past, as the author and producer Mitch Glazer as soon as wrote, and sometimes upstages the expertise itself.

A working example was Saturday’s social gathering for the reopening of the Giorgio Armani flagship on Rodeo Drive, a glamorous mosh pit by which a whole bunch of these from the Juvéderm and micro-mini face-lift set jostled for respiration house.

They sipped Veuve Clicquot Champagne or iced Limoncello and ogled the various present folks — Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Annabelle Wallis, Miles Teller and Dylan Sprouse — who got here out on a cool California night. Regardless of whom anybody was speaking to, all eyes had been on the entrance door awaiting the arrival of Nicole Kidman, the night’s honored visitor.

A ripple ran by means of the room when Ms. Kidman — an Oscar nominee for her function as Lucille Ball in “Being the Ricardos” — swept in at 5:52 p.m., surrounded by a safety phalanx and Kevin Huvane, the co-chair of CAA, in fullback kind on the lead.

Wearing a black Armani pantsuit, a décolleté embroidered bustier and flats (“I wished to put on man’s garments,” she instructed this reporter) to offset her commanding top, Ms. Kidman instantly sequestered herself in a nook wedged between a case of velvet clutches and a rack of beaded frocks.

Together with her unlined and poreless, bisque-doll complexion and her startled Dresden-blue eyes, she appeared too preternaturally glamorous to suit her characterization of herself, in a latest Vainness Honest article, as an “oddball.”

“Oh, I’m an oddball,” Ms. Kidman mentioned flatly, when requested about her self-assessment. “I’m an introvert. I feel laterally — at all times have and at all times will.”

Ms. Kidman is 54 and first starred as a number one actress in a movie 33 years in the past. Such a feat of show-business survival would appear exhausting to surpass. But 20 minutes after she arrived, the group parted once more, this time for the arrival of Sophia Loren, who made her first cinematic look seven a long time in the past.

It doesn’t matter what doomsayers might say a couple of crumbling dream machine, the impress of those luminous beings on our cultural consciousness is without end. Positive, shifting applied sciences will alter how fantasy is delivered. The urge for food for it would at all times stay.

Contemplate a spontaneous scene that erupted when the mob clamoring exterior the Armani social gathering noticed a tuxedo two-tone convertible Rolls-Royce cruising up Rodeo Drive, prime down and Mark Wahlberg behind the wheel. Out of the blue the group surged into the road to encompass the car, “The Day of the Locust”-style, with smartphone cameras hungrily fixing him of their sights.

Mr. Wahlberg grinned like a tanned and benevolent deity accepting tribute, as the road echoed with the cries of strangers shouting his identify: “Mark! Mark! Mark!’’

Relying on one’s vantage level, girls both have all of the enjoyable or are caught with the heavy lifting relating to Oscars dressing.

Harvey Keitel was fantastic cruising into Chanel’s annual pre-Oscar dinner on Saturday, held within the gardens of the Beverly Hills Resort and its storied Polo Lounge, carrying a primary black jacket and sandals. It’s socially acceptable for each Charles Finch, the co-host of the starry, hot-ticket night, and Jamie Dornan to put on white shirts with the collars left deeply unbuttoned. Chris Pine elicited oohs and aahs in nothing extra particular than a rumpled linen swimsuit out of Don Johnson’s “Miami Vice’’ closet.

Girls don’t have it almost really easy, even with Chanel munificently offering a few of them with their social gathering glad rags.

“I instructed my stylist I’m afraid of this gown,’’ mentioned Minnie Driver, referring to a slinky creation with a floor-length black skirt, a decent beaded coral prime and stylized pagoda shoulders. “She instructed me, ‘You need to be afraid of this gown! It raises your sport.’’

Nonetheless, Ms. Driver appeared Instagram prepared, and that was the duty.

And so, as one after one other feminine visitor queued up in opposition to a wall of philodendron for a photograph op, the outcome was a spectacle that in all probability exists nowhere else exterior this metropolis through the Oscars.

The scene resembled a type of Discovery Channel specials about unique reef fish or the snow crane — an inflow of outstanding beauties disporting themselves in essentially the most spectacular method.

Right here was Kristen Stewart hanging saucy, sullen tough-guy poses in her Chanel tweeds. Right here was Rashida Jones by some means making a matronly frock look recent. Right here was Sofia Coppola demonstrating Coco Chanel’s adage that luxurious will not be the other of poverty however of vulgarity. Right here was Kate Beckinsale along with her hair in a tower of what gave the impression to be brioches sucking air in little guppy breaths that saved her lips photogenically parted.

And right here was Joan Collins powering throughout the purple carpet on a pair of four-inch “Dynasty’’ heels. With a sequence of appearances lined up for a brand new memoir she had composed aloud in diary kind, as she defined to this observer, Ms. Collins confirmed no proof of getting misplaced her urge for food for fame, its trappings or the trouble required to carry on to each.

Requested what the key was of her abiding ambition to stay a participant, as she approaches 90, Ms. Collins paused and slowly lowered her mink-like lashes. After a second, her lids popped up once more, and he or she had a solution.

“I might say, eat life,’’ Ms. Collins mentioned. “Or life will eat you.’’

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