Battle is on for best Oscar party

Here, at the heart of Sunday's glittering ceremony, nerves are jangling about the new $94 million Kodak Theatre, a 3,300-seat amphitheatre that has been built in the heart of Hollywood to host the Academy Awards.

So high are the seats in the upper balconies that doctors in rented tuxedos will be on hand in case any of the octogenarian Academy members have difficulty in breathing after their climb. Worse, journalists have moaned there is nowhere to park their television trucks and crews (they have to be "shuttled" over), the auditorium's acoustics are apparently awful, and the Hollywood and Highland neighbourhood is awash with high-rise buildings that may block their satellite signals.

But the Academy needn't worry about such trifling matters, as the real point of Sunday's Oscars for both Hollywood's power list and the global army of showbiz reporters is not to attend the ceremony itself - all Press are banned from the show anyway - but to rub shoulders with the stars, and one another, at the orgy of parties hosted afterwards.

Indeed, as an event for both the town's stars and executive elite, who would much rather sit next to Helena Bonham Carter at the Vanity Fair party at Morton's than sit through the interminable show itself, the Oscars has been party-jacked.

This was confirmed to me last year when my agent at the ICM agency told me that several of his colleagues, and rivals at the CAA agency, made a point of ringing up "tame" showbiz party beat reporters and begging them to mention that they were at the Vanity Fair party, although they weren't even invited. "It looks good," the agent said. "In fact, it's essential to get a name-check."

As Russell Crowe demonstrated in his altercation in a broom cupboard with a senior official after the Bafta awards, it is the after-parties that generate publicity - not the over-long, self-congratulatory and tear-jerkingly politically correct ceremony itself.

Although nobody will dare admit it, the real reason the Oscars have been moved from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the ghetto-like depths of Downtown LA, and the Shrine Auditorium in the gangland territory of Crips, to a glitzy new home in a Hollywood shopping mall is so that the stars can get into the Vanity Fair party at Morton's restaurant in Beverly Hills that much quicker. Now it's only a convenient 10-minute limo drive away from the awards show, or their houses in Bel Air.

What began as a plan to fill the Oscar after-party gap left by the death of agent Swifty Lazar has since escalated into something more threatening for the Academy, revealing much about who really wears the pants in Hollywood's near-incestuous relationship with New York's powerful glossy-magazine world.

Indeed, so I've been told by an editor friend of mine at Vanity Fair, this year the dinner during the Oscar-cast is being held in a large tent beside the restaurant, so as to allow VIP guests, presenters, nominees, stars and executives who have done their bit at the ceremony (or who are just plain bored) to mingle with one another while the awards drag on.

Until this year, the only drawback of winning an Oscar was it meant you had to attend the dreary Governor's Ball, the Academy's official "party", in a vast tent pitched next to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, nearly 20 miles from the real Oscar party action. Most guests wisely left halfway through their grilled swordfish, telling their drivers to "floor it" to Morton's. Or to Sir Elton John's Aids foundation bash at Moomba restaurant two blocks away.