Even the Oscars after-parties have lost their shine

Reading about the Oscars this week, I couldn’t help thinking back to a time when they actually meant something. When I lived in America in the mid-1990s, the Academy Awards were described as ‘the gay Super Bowl’ which, although it sounded flippant, acknowledged their cultural significance. And judging from the number of people who watched them, the Oscars were a big deal. In 1998, the year Titanic won Best Picture, 55 million Americans tuned in. This year, the Oscars attracted an average of 23.6 million viewers, an all-time low. Not so much the Super Bowl as Bristol Rovers vs Southend United on a rainy Tuesday night.

The parabolic decline of the Vanity Fair Oscars party makes for a good case study in what has gone wrong. I gatecrashed the party in 1994, the first year it was held, by pretending to be William Cash, then the Times’s Los Angeles correspondent. This was before Graydon Carter, then the editor-in-chief, had managed to enlist the Los Angeles Country Sheriff’s Department to check everyone’s credentials.