Yeoh, Fraser feel the love at Vanity Fair post-Oscars party

(AP):

Michelle Yeoh and Angela Bassett locked in a long embrace, their bare, muscle-bound arms wrapped around each other. They whispered, laughed and squealed with glee as nearly every phone in the vicinity came out to take photos.

Vanity Fair’s annual post-Oscars party was full of such moments of warmth and joy as Sunday night led into Monday morning, after a drama-free Academy Awards, with none of the head-shaking heaviness that hung over last year’s post-slap edition.

Yeoh, whose Best Actress Oscar was one of seven on a dominant night for Everything Everywhere All at Once, had just walked into the party and was swarmed by well-wishers and selfie-seekers before seeing Bassett, who hadn’t looked happy when she lost best supporting actress to Yeoh’s castmate Jamie Lee Curtis but was all smiles here.

Yeoh later grasped her Oscar as she rocked back and forth to the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me at the edge of the dance floor, though it was hard to do much dancing with all the attention she was getting.

Brendan Fraser got the same treatment when he walked in holding his Best Actor Oscar for The Whale shortly before Yeoh, making his way very slowly across the room amid constant congratulations.

Half of the directing duo behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Scheinert, stood outside and ate an In-N-Out burger, the party’s traditional meal, as he bopped up and down to House of Pain’s Jump Around.

“Finally getting some dinner,” Scheinert said as a long night, and an even longer awards season, neared its end. “This is nice.”

The champagne-soaked affair, which begins as a viewing party for 100 people and grows into the night’s most sought-after invitation, is thrown in a space that connects the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts with Beverly Hills City Hall and is hosted by Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones.

It’s always also full of far-less-famous folks holding Oscars, winners in categories including best documentary short, who get an automatic invite with their statuette.

Oscar night is just beginning for many stars once the ceremony itself ends, and the first stop is always the Governors Ball, just an escalator ride up from the Dolby Theatre in the Ovation Hollywood complex.

Winners go with one main objective: getting their Oscars engraved with their names, which this year was in plain sight of the party. Others take the chance to get a bite to eat of the Wolfgang Puck-prepared bites.

Here, too, the mood couldn’t have been more different from the year prior, when the slap cast a pallor on the celebration. This time around, the winners could simply focus on their own moment.