From Sinners versus One Battle After Another in the best-picture race to Timothée Chalamet versus Michael B. Jordan in the lead-actor category, questions about the 2026 Oscars abound. But there’s no question about where to celebrate once the 98th Academy Awards are over. That would be the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, where A-listers gather to drink, dance, and be merry until the early-morning hours. For its 31st annual Oscar party, VF is celebrating Hollywood’s biggest night at a fresh location: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which will soon open its brand-new galleries to the public.
After you’ve watched the Oscars 2026, airing at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on Sunday, March 15, with Conan O’Brien acting as host for the second year in a row, slip into something a little less comfortable for the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Chalamet and girlfriend Kylie Jenner last year mingled with his A Complete Unknown costar Elle Fanning, who is a first-time nominee this year in best supporting actress for Sentimental Value. The year before that, Glen Powell, Donald Glover, Jennifer Lawrence, and Sabrina Carpenter were among the A-list attendees. Stay tuned to see who landed an invite this year. Ahead, everything you need to know about the Vanity Fair Oscar Party—from its bold origins to its bright new future.
What is the Vanity Fair Oscar Party?
For a refresher on the history of Hollywood’s splashiest awards season fête, check out Vanity Fair’s oral history of the Oscar party, in which stars including Gwyneth Paltrow, Lindsay Lohan, fashion designer and filmmaker Tom Ford, and celebrity stylist turned Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Rachel Zoe shared their favorite memories from bygone editions of the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
Learn how a relatively modest meeting of Oscar honorees at Mortons restaurant on Melrose in 1994 transformed into a must-see soiree. “It’s an event that demonstrates the specialness of a bunch of different artists,” Bryan Lourd, CEO of Creative Artists Agency, told VF’s Elise Taylor. “You can either be cynical about it and say those stupid, rich, dumb Hollywood people, or you can say those people that allow for escapism in a moment that the world actually needs it.”
Where is the Vanity Fair Oscar Party held?
Over the 2010s the party was held in a few different locations, including the Sunset Tower Hotel and the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills—where, until this year, it took place in a built-from-scratch complex of velvet-clad bars and dance floors. For the 98th Academy Awards, the Vanity Fair Oscar Party is moving to LACMA—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Art correspondent Nate Freeman toured the building with director Michael Govan for his new story, “The Man, the Metropolis, and the $720 Million Museum,” featuring mid-installation photographs by Max Farago. “We can do outdoor movies, concerts, we’ll do an art festival here—the Calder sculpture’s going to be over there under those lights, with the jets of water,” Govan told Freeman during his visit. “Shio Kusaka has a spaceship, a flying saucer that’s beyond the education space. So the idea is it’s a garden of follies.”
