Movies

Inside the A-List Events – The Hollywood Reporter

March 25, 2022

The red carpet has been rolled out across Los Angeles in advance of the 94th annual Academy Awards, bringing with it dozens of celebrations across the city to toast the year’s biggest achievements in film. Heading into March, there was more than a fair amount of apprehension and anxiety from event producers and party planners about how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic would impact celebrations this year, amped up by a new variant and following last year’s muted social calendar. Goal, major party players like Vanity Fair, Elton John, MPTF, Chanel and even Oscar nominee Beyoncé and Jay-Z are back (via extra layers of precautions like PCR tests, vaccine checks and masks) with can’t-miss bashes this year in the days leading up to Sunday’s telecast . Below are some insider highlights from 2022 soirees, with new events added every day through Monday.

Pre-Oscars South Asian Excellence Event

On Wednesday, hosts Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Mindy Kaling, Kumail Nanjiani, Anjula Acharia, Bela Bajaria, Maneesh K. Goyal, and Shruti Ganguly feted this year’s South Asian Oscar nominees with a celebration at UTA, raising a glass to Riz Ahmed (Flee, The Long Goodbye), Joseph Patel (summer of soul), Suroosh Alvi (Flee) Pawo Choyning Dorji (Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom), Aneil Karia (The Long Goodbye), Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei (Three Songs for Benazir), Rintu Thomas, Sushmit Ghosh and Anurima Bhargava (Writing with Fire). Attendees also included Aziz Ansari, Lily Singh and Kal Penn, with sponsors UTA, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, Johnnie Walker, The South Asian Arts Resiliency Fund of The India Center and The Juggernaut.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Nisha Ganatra, Poorna Jagannathan, Payal Kadakia, Zohreen Shah and Jay Shetty
Courtesy of Braja Mandala

Lazy loaded image — Priyanka Chopra and Aziz Ansari
Courtesy of Braja Mandala

Vanities Party: A Night for Young Hollywood

Co-hosted by Alana Haim, Giveon and Ariana DeBose on Tuesday night (though the Oscar-nominated West Side Story star did not make an appearance as she was busy filming Kraven in London), Vanity Fair and Bacardi Rum celebrated young Hollywood at old Hollywood’s iconic hotspot Musso & Frank. As Haim partied alongside her sister and bandmate Danielle Haim, fellow guests included Hunter Schaffer, Kaitlyn Dever, Joey King, Chloe Fineman, Diplo, Gavin Leatherwood, Charlie Puth, Chase Stokes and Insecure‘s Kendrick Sampson and Sarunas J. Jackson.

EMILY’s List’s The Collective Power of Women Event

The organization, a national resource for women in politics, returned to the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles in Beverly Hills for its 5th annual pre-awards breakfast. The program delivered an inspired morning thanks to two conversations that went down at center stage, both focused on successes achieved when women in politics and entertainment work together and lift each other up to create a better environment for all women. The first featured EMILY’s List Creative Council member Amber Tamblyn chatting up WNBA star, ESPN host and activist Chiney Ogwumike.

Laphonza Butler, EMILY’s List first Black president, then welcomed board of directors member Yvette Nicole Brown to the stage to serve as moderator for a panel discussion that featured showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett, Never Have I Ever star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, newly-named Hall of Fame marketing executive Bozoma Saint John, multi-hyphenate Robin Thede, and Congresswoman and LA mayoral candidate Karen Bass. “Women have fought for me, so who would I be to not fight for them?” asked A Black Lady Sketch Show creator Thede (whose mother is a member of Iowa’s House of Representatives). “My life is full of women who support everything I do…we have to be willing to accept it as much as we give it.”

It’s needed now more than ever, suggested Bass. “The reality is that we went through those horrible four years with that crazy man [Donald Trump], and one lesson that we should learn from that, is even though we’ve won certain battles, you can never assume that just because you won the right to vote, that you’re always going to have the right to vote,” she explained. “We can’t make the assumption that [because] we won the right to choose how to guide our own bodies, that right is always going to be there, which is why we’re in the fight for our lives over the right to control our bodies right now.”