The Vanity Fair Oscars after-party is the hottest ticket of the showbiz year – when the stars gather to let their hair down, martini in one hand and gold statuette in the other.
The only space more hallowed – a party within a party – is Mark Seliger’s 18-by-30-foot photo studio in the parking lot. In this ‘spacious box,’ as he calls it, he manages to capture something of the magic of the night – with a little help from a generous supply of Don Julio tequila.
A new book – Vanity Fair: Oscar Night Sessions: A Decade of Portraits from the After-Party – revisits a decade of after-party images, from their humble beginnings in 2014 – when 12 Years A Slave swept the awards (the opening shot of the book is Lupita Nyong’o, clutching her best supporting actress Oscar) – to the most recent event in 2023.
Some of the images, like any family album, are deeply poignant – a thoughtful Chadwick Boseman, photographed in 2018, who died of colon cancer two years later; Vanessa and Kobe Bryant in a loving embrace the same year, before his sudden death in a helicopter crash in 2020; and the cast of Euphoria – looking, well, euphoric – in 2022. Angus Cloud died a year later of an accidental overdose.
Jessica Chastain, photographed with her best actress Oscar for The Eyes of Tammy Faye in 2022
Offset and Cardi B at the after-party in March 2023. They broke up earlier this month
Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, photographed in 2016
Lupita Nyong’o clutches her best supporting actress Oscar for 12 Years a Slave at Seliger’s first after-party photo shoot in 2014
Then there are the couples who couldn’t have foreseen the very public breakups they’d endure just a few years after they were photographed (Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux, and Offset with Cardi B).
‘It all began a decade ago,’ writes Seliger in his introduction, ‘when Vanity Fair’s then-editor, Graydon Carter — who had thrown the magazine’s first Oscar night bash in 1994 — pitched the notion of an Instagram portrait studio inside the party, with images to be posted online the same night.
‘To be honest, I couldn’t imagine how it would work. As always, however, I trusted Graydon’s vision. His enthusiasm for the idea, new and untested as it was (Instagram had only been launched four years before), was matched by his confidence that we could pull it off with the formality and polish intrinsic to all things Vanity Fair.’
The first session, he recalls, was not promising. ‘It happened so quickly, I could barely grasp whether we had actually captured anything good. I recall walking out of the party with my longtime producer, Ruth Levy, at around two o’clock in the morning, saying to her, “Never again.” It wasn’t until we were looking back at the images later, however, that I saw it: Lupita Nyong’o, holding an Oscar (for her role in 12 Years a Slave), beaming with pure joy. It was the exact emotion I had hoped to capture.’
Now, his studio is an essential stop-off for stars as they party. ‘It helps,’ says Seliger, ‘that our “holding room” is a quiet little speakeasy tucked away from the party, stocked with Don Julio, where folks can take a breather.’
Scarlett Johansson dressed in Oscars gold for the after-party in 2020
Taika Waititi goofs it up for the camera, with his Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Jojo Rabbit in 2020
The cast of Euphoria – Maude Apatow, Angus Cloud, and Barbie Ferreira – in 2022. Angus Cloud died a year later of an accidental overdose
Vanessa and Kobe Bryant, who won for best animated short film, Dear Basketball, in 2018. Kobe would die two years later in a helicopter crash
In his afterword, Alan Cumming describes what it’s like to sit before Seliger’s lens – while dishing the gossip on Hollywood’s most scandalous of nights.
‘Over the years, I have had many memorable moments,’ he writes. ‘In pre-cannabis-legalization days, Bill Maher taught me that the best place to sneak a doobie was in the corridor to the ladies’ loo.
‘Another year I got the inside scoop from Kate Winslet about how to avoid the agony that trotting around on precipitous heels invokes: Before you go out for the evening, put your high heels in the ice box! Then, when you hit the red carpet and begin answering the litany of banal questions, your bunions will be numbed and your feet will never swell.’
‘You’d never know that so much life and joy and even love had filled a single, roughly 18-by-30-foot rectangle in a Beverly Hills parking lot,’ says Seliger. ‘But for one starry night, every year, it does. And it lives on in this book.’
Oscar Night Sessions: A Decade of Portraits from the After-Party by Mark Seliger is published by Harry N Abrams
