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Oscars 2009: Daniel Craig and Natalie Portman shun official party for Vanity Fair bash When Oscar ceremony presenters Daniel Craig and Natalie Portman decamp to the Vanity Fair party before the awards in Los Angeles have even finished, you can look at it one of two ways.   By Tom Leonard in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 3:04PM GMT 23 Feb 2009 Oscar ceremony presenters Daniel Craig and Natalie Portman decamp to the Vanity Fair party before the awards have even finished Photo: GETTY Either the magazine's famous annual party is very good or the awards ceremony is, well, rather dull.Uma Thurman, Rachel Weisz and Mick Jagger were all at the Vanity Fair "viewing party" dinner while the Academy Awards were still going. So, too, were Craig and Portman even though both had presented awards early in the ceremony.Around 700 guests attended the dinner or the subsequent after-show party, despite claims by the organisers that they were paring back the event in keeping with the recessionary times.The party was certainly held in a smaller venue, the art deco Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. It is traditional at such events for the big winners of the night to hold court with a trail of well-wishers, often equally famous, lining up to offer their congratulations.In the absence of the Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, who instead attended his film's own party, the floor at the Vanity Fair party was largely left to Kate Winslet.Sitting in between her parents on a couch in a corner of the hotel's terrace room, the Best Actress winner clutched her Oscar in one hand as she embraced with the other."It's been great, just great," she said, while acknowledging that the Oscar campaigning of recent months had been exhausting. "I'm going to go and hide in a cave now," she added.Earlier that night, she arrived at the party just as Meryl Streep, her main rival for the award, was leaving. When the pair agreed to pose together for photographers, Streep jokingly took the Oscar statue.The Vanity Fair party is an institution at the Oscars and the celebrity guest list goes on and on, an impressive but certainly eclectic mix that this year included Madonna, Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz, Rupert Murdoch, Smokey Robinson and Calvin Klein.Sir Elton John, who hosts the other big annual party, is now able to make the Vanity Fair party after rescheduling his own event a few years ago.He spent most of the time at the Sunset Tower posing for photographs with strangers, including even some of the Oscar winners.Winslet left shortly after 2am with her parents and husband, Sam Mendes, manically waving her Oscar one final time at a group of fans screaming from the other side of Sunset Boulevard.   

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 February 8, 2010Media CacheFree vs. Paid, Murdoch vs. Rusbridger By ERIC PFANNERDATELINE — Welcome to the liveliest fight on Fleet Street. In the blue corner, we have Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp. In the red corner, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. Each wants to knock out the other’s vision of the future of journalism.On paper, it’s no contest. Mr. Murdoch is the heavyweight champion of the media world; an old-fashioned brawler whose prizes include newspapers like The Sun, The Times of London, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. Mr. Rusbridger is a relative flyweight, a Harry Potter lookalike who runs a single, modest-size publication.But paper is passé. This battle is over cyberspace, which has a way of leveling the odds. And when Mr. Murdoch or his newspapers are involved, Mr. Rusbridger doesn’t pull his punches.He drew the first blood in the current round, which centers on whether newspaper Web sites should charge their readers; Mr. Murdoch says yes, Mr. Rusbridger, no. Having “ruthlessly cut the price of his papers to below cost in order to win audiences or drive out competition,” Mr. Rusbridger said in a recent speech, “this same Rupert Murdoch is being very vocal in asserting that the reader must pay a proper sum for content — whether in print or digitally.”Mr. Rusbridger said so-called pay walls would be a bad idea for The Guardian’s journalism, which has benefited from the free exchange of ideas on the Web, and for its business, which hopes to translate growth in readership into increased advertising revenue.Newspapers that defy these trends, he said, risk “sleepwalking into oblivion.”Until recently, with online advertising growing at double-digit rates and print revenue in decline, Mr. Rusbridger’s position reflected the conventional wisdom of the news industry. But Internet ad growth stalled during the recession, prompting many publishers to rethink their business models. Mr. Murdoch says he plans to start erecting pay walls for all of News Corp.’s newspaper Web sites this year. One of them, The Wall Street Journal, already charges online readers. News Corp. is not alone. The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune, says it intends to start charging some Web readers in 2011 under a metered system that will offer users a limited number of free articles. Publishers like Axel Springer of Germany say they are also moving ahead with plans for paid digital content.But Mr. Murdoch has been the most outspoken proponent of pay walls, and he responded to Mr. Rusbridger’s jabs with an uppercut.When asked, during a conference call last week on News Corp.’s earnings, for his opinion on Mr. Rusbridger’s view, Mr. Murdoch responded with an expletive.If Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Rusbridger are on opposite sides of an ideological divide, it is in part because of profound differences in the enterprises they oversee. The Guardian is owned by a nonprofit trust, and Mr. Rusbridger acknowledged in his speech that it lost money. News Corp. looks out for its shareholders, even if…