From the Telegraph 26th March 2002

Should we write thank-yous?
While the Americans twittered about 'dreams' and 'journeys', the British brought sanity and sang-froid to the Oscars. Sarah Sands mingled


Sarah Sands 12:01AM GMT 26 Mar 2002

JULIAN FELLOWES accepted his Oscar for best original screenplay with Foreign Office graciousness. He praised the generosity of the host nation and added, stirringly: "God Bless America." As his wife, Emma Kitchener-Fellowes, a daughter of the empire, ablaze with the spirit of the Mitfords, had put it earlier: "Must write thank you letters."
There was something about the West Coast fervour of these Oscars that brought out the character of the English. Emma, a handsome, 6ft Sloane, has embraced Hollywood with a style of her own. She divides her new acquaintances into those she adores and those she worships - meaning, I think, quite likes and likes.
She describes a party given by an old-style Hollywood agent, Ed Limato, in Coldwater Canyon, as resembling a "debs' dance". Anticipating the Oscars ceremony, Emma said she was so excited she "could hardly breathe".
"It feels like my wedding day," she said, the difference being that Catherine Walker had been dropped in favour of Tomasz Starzewski. She had been instructed to sit on her hands in the limo, in order to avoid creasing the skirt. "It is fine, you just have to act as if you are using a loo that you don't trust, so you hover above the seat."
She was almost in heaven but for the absence of her 11-year-old son, Peregrine, who boards at Ludgrove. He learnt of his father's Oscar nomination when a teacher walked into the classroom waving a flag, and said that someone in the room had an Oscar candidate for a father. Emma could not explain the presence of the flag, but it was a jolly thing to do.

The golden statuette, which is not very Hampshire, means that the couple will now seriously consider moving to Los Angeles. I do hope that Emma will not lose her gift for language. After an Oscar afternoon in which spouses were praised as "inspiring", children as "little messengers" and marriages, like roles, were about "building dreams", Emma described her Oscar-winning husband thus: "Short, fat, balding and Catholic. Not at all who I imagined. I thought I would marry an 8ft ex-Army officer with 50,000 acres in Wiltshire."
Similarly, as Oscar presenters oozed awe and admiration at the quality of "the work", Emma was precise about her contribution to her husband's dream-building. "Spelling. I adore spelling. Oh, and spacing, I have a trained typist's eye on that." If she is delighted by a character or phrasing, she will put in a series of ticks. "Julian is a very clever man," she says, scoldingly.

Emma Kitchener-Fellowes was the great British disovery behind the scenes, but the British contingent generally struck out against Australian and American cultural domination. The nominated men - Jim Broadbent, Tom Wilkinson and Julian Fellowes (although not Ian McKellen) - looked like school masters and the women - Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith (although not Kate Winslet) - like stage actresses.

The departure from the Four Seasons hotel was a case in point. At around 3pm, black limos surrounded the block and were directed to the front steps by men wearing earpieces, who themselves looked like actors. The American actresses, in clouds of pastel chiffon and serum-drenched hair, stood in the cold sunshine in the prescribed position: feet first, bodies twisted to a slight angle, bags hanging loosely from straight arms and mouths open but not grinning.

They assumed this posture until they could step straight from the red carpet into the car. This procedure took such concentration on the part of the security men that they did not seem to notice me strolling freely into the hotel.
The English held themselves differently. First, Jim Broadbent shambled down the red carpet and waited halfway, shoulders back, stomach thrust forward. As his limo drove up, he opened the door tentatively and peered in, as if searching for a torch in his tool shed. Ian McKellen bounced down the carpet, looking dandy in patent slippers and round, coloured-glass spectacles. He shot past the men in earpieces and wandered, whistling, into the street to find the car himself.

It is not that the Brits do not know how to be grand. The great dames can be sweet and cooperative, while maintaining a cordon of hauteur. And all of the British actresses seemed to have acquired an extra layer of polish this year. Dame Judi looked incandescently glamorous.

An East Coast young mother staying at the hotel chided her son for stopping to look at the red carpet palaver. "Darling, it is just people in long dresses getting into cars oh, my goodness! Look! It is Dame Judi Dench!" The actress is said to be slightly embarrassed at being regularly confused with the Queen.
Perhaps one reason why the British develop exaggerated traits in Los Angeles is that, for all its industry and financial muscle, LA feels like a holiday resort, and we are truer to ourselves on holiday.

Helen Fielding, who lives in Hollywood following the success of Bridget Jones's Diary, says that blue skies and a swimming pool are still a daily miracle to her. You don't hang out in London or New York, but you do here. The holiday feeling is more acute because people come and go according to the location demands of their filming. An English actor I know in LA expects to spend three months a year at his home in the hills. It is practically timeshare. Also, the dynamics of the day do not conform to office regulations. There is yoga and meetings and projects and your people talking to my people and barbeques.

It could be the Algarve, were it not for all the publicists and agents. Art has a bottom line. On Sunset Strip on Saturday evening, the fashionable Mondrian hotel prepared itself for the party thrown by Miramax, purveyor of high-class films. The reception rooms were dominated by two Mercedes-Benz cars and the boards gave Miramax second billing after Mercedes. Halle Berry, who sobbed about enlightenment as if she personally had abolished slavery, nevertheless recovered enough to thank her lawyers. There is no doubt where the power lies here.

This Oscar ceremony, billed as post-September 11, post-celebrity and doubly patriotic, was in fact grandiose and gruesomely self-centred. The comic writer Rob Long once imagined a conversation between two studio bosses on September 11. The first runs in with the news that two full passenger planes have crashed into the twin towers. "Was anybody on the planes?" asks the second.

Sunday was Hollywood's opportunity to push itself back into the limelight, from which it has been cruelly excluded. Tom Cruise's introduction, "celebrate the magic of movies", became the ceremony's theme. Cruise's definition of magic was something as vague and annoying as a beautiful spirit. When the British talk about magic they mean Harry Potter and broomsticks. But the only real magic of the evening was the vivacity and courage of the Cirque du Soleil. I hope Sam Mendes, sitting with Kate Winslet, felt his heart tug at the marvel of live theatre.

The British party took their failed nominations in good part, Helen Mirren looking brighter and more flirtatious as the proceedings wore on. The metaphors lurched from dreams to visions to journeys, or incredible journeys (better to arrive than to travel, I say). Peter Jackson and his middle earth entourage upped the mystic stakes still further. Jim Broadbent re-established links with the world. "Well, stone the crows," he said as he picked up his statue. Or was it: "Stone the Crowe"?

At last came the parties. I use the plural because there has been some negative campaigning about the Vanity Fair bash this year. Disaffected or independent voices, depending on your view, claimed that Elton John's was the funky person's choice. There was a bit of a knees-up with Elton at the piano. Anxious, I telephoned Beth Kseniak, Vanity Fair's director of public relations, to check whether Elton was overtaking. "It is a different crowd," said Beth, sweetly, devastatingly.

My mood lightened with the arrival of a precious pass to the VF party, a baseball hat and a T-shirt. I draw a veil over the fact that the despatch bike must have been running pretty low on fuel by the time it reached my little hotel. Despite Hollywood's adventurous relocating of the Oscars at the Kodak theatre, it recognises only about five streets in LA's 100-mile sprawl. The taxi drivers could not find my hotel, let alone the Vanity Fair publicists.

The most repeated conversation I had with industry insiders over the weekend was a defensively jolly explanation of my whereabouts: So it isn't the Beverly Wilshire (or "Wiltshire", as Emma would say). But it's not the Four Seasons either? It must be near the Plaza, right? It's not even listed?
Any doubts I had that Vanity Fair was conceding to Elton John fled as I saw the dancing lights above Morton's restaurant, the police blockades, the banks of photographers, the breathy screams of onlookers. This was the world's best exclusion zone. Inside, a party democracy prevailed. Gwyneth Paltrow stood close enough to allow examination of her wholly transparent top and her flattened, shockingly natural breasts. Hugh Grant bantered with Nicole Kidman; Sarah Jessica Parker puffed away with Cameron Diaz; Uma Thurman flirted with her husband, Ethan Hawke.

The only figure who did not go along with the illusion of mingling was Jennifer Lopez, who had at least three minders, not to mention her husband, forming a cordon sanitaire around her bottom. One minder watched her gorgeous balloon of a behind so attentively that he trod heavily on the train of Uma's dress, almost sending her flying.

I sat on one of the assorted white sofas and noticed the man on my other side was Warren Beatty. And the chatty broad in a trouser suit was Anjelica Huston. In the words of Oscar presenters, I was building dreams, visions.

Although the famous and the non-famous mingled, the tribes of Hollywood nevertheless asserted themselves. In one corner of the room sat Jackie and Joan Collins with a group of tight-faced Palm Beach matrons and a grinning Barry Humphries. This was formal Hollywood. Gwyneth Paltrow retreated to the opposite side of the room with an arty, unshaven, unbuttoned crowd of male admirers who were too hip to look at her bare titties.

There were two other types of women. The first could be described as Victoria's Secrets girls, pretty and curvy in a billboard kind of way. Then there were the aggressively busty glamour models, in tiny skirts and stretchy white tops, who looked several states away from the world of Vanity Fair. Helen Fielding wisely remarked that LA has the greatest density of pretty women in the world, with the unfortunate result that prettiness is a diminished currency.

There was one man at the centre of the hustling blondes, who looked dapper in a loosened shirt and black cummerbund but still noticeably older than the rest of the company. As his young wife tugged him round the room, he seemed dazed with tiredness. "That man needs a cup of cocoa and an early night," said a woman to whom I was chatting. Since he turned out, on closer inspection, to be Rupert Murdoch, I decided not to pass on her kindly advice.
Apart from Russell Crowe and Halle Luther King, we were heading for a celebrity full house. Even better, reports were drifting in from the Elton John party, where word of a VIP room was causing outrage. "What? Like the royal enclosure?" exclaimed one guest. "How unbelievably naff." The social commentator Nicky Haslam pronounced his joy complete because Stephen Daldry had goosed him and he now realised he had met Janet Jackson, having mistaken her for Eartha Kitt the entire evening.

Julian and Emma Fellowes arrived bearing gold and Jim Broadbent passed his statue around while he lit a cigarette. The Oscars are less of a dream than a descent into madness. Perhaps that is why the British enjoy them so much. Rather than Hollywood establishing itself as capital of the New World Order, it confirmed itself as a haven for children and lunatics. But with a daily miracle of swimming pools and blue skies.