Inside the 2025 Vanity Fair Oscars Party

Zoe Saldaña stood in the middle of Vanity Fair’s Oscars after-party Sunday night, holding an In-N-Out burger in one hand and her best supporting actress statuette in the other.

She hugged Cynthia Erivo twice and then grinned for a selfie with Gayle King. Queen Latifah applauded as she twirled at the center of a dance circle.

If Adrien Brody had similar moves, he kept them to himself. He brought along his Oscar for best actor and his parents, who were asked over and over about how proud they must be of their son.

“We’re so ashamed,” his father, Elliot Brody, deadpanned.

At Vanity Fair’s annual post-Oscars party, the ceremony’s victors and also-rans streamed in one after another for a stiff drink or a victory lap.

The party remains one of the most coveted tickets on Oscars night, even as the calendar has grown crowded with events hosted by Madonna and Jay-Z. Few other after-parties inspire the same jostling for invitations or attract the same density of stars.

Guests entered through an elaborate system of tents outside the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and then posed for a phalanx of photographers.

Once inside, Timothée Chalamet held hands with Kylie Jenner as he greeted an enthusiastic Sacha Baron Cohen. Ms. Jenner eventually made her way to the bar, where she met up with her sisters Kendall Jenner and Kim Kardashian.

Isabella Rossellini held court on a plush couch in the rear of the room. The part of the awards ceremony she would remember most was its “In Memoriam” segment, she said.

“I think the moment when I saw the photo of David Lynch,” she said of her former partner. “That made it real.”

The Vanity Fair party was first held in 1994 at Morton’s steak house on Melrose, where Nancy Reagan, Donald Sutherland and Gene Hackman were among 100 dinner guests.

It eventually spilled into the parking lot behind the restaurant and in 2009 relocated to the Sunset Tower Hotel. The party survived the departure of Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor in chief, in 2017.

On Sunday, Radhika Jones, Mr. Carter’s successor, greeted all of the winners as they arrived. She briefly practiced her Russian with the cast of “Anora,” the best picture winner.

The film — a dramedy about a stripper who marries the hard-partying son of an oligarch — won five Oscars, including best actress. Mikey Madison had changed out of the pink satin gown she wore while accepting that award and into an all-black, strapless dress.

She put her statuette on a side table and relaxed on a couch next to the film’s director, Sean Baker.

The evening had no shortage of risqué fashion: Meghan Thee Stallion wore a moss-green gown revealing enough to require matching nipple covers. Olivia Wilde wore a lacy mosquito net of a dress from Chloé. Zoë Kravitz wore a black gown with a sheer panel over her backside.

Sarah Paulson’s asymmetric Marc Jacobs creation, however, featured pillowy tumors of fabric that stuck out from her shoulders and waist. Well past midnight, Ms. Paulson had taken off her heels and was dancing barefoot with Doja Cat to “Highway to Hell.”

Guests seemed eager to let loose at the end of an unusually rocky awards season. After deadly wildfires devastated the Los Angeles area in January, one ceremony after another tried to strike a tricky balance between somber reflection and the usual self-congratulatory glitz.

Then came the controversies: “The Brutalist” was criticized for using an A.I. speech tool to enhance the Hungarian spoken by Adrien Brody. Derogatory tweets were unearthed from Karla Sofía Gascón, the star of “Emilia Pérez,” who then embarked on a rogue tour to defend herself.

Ms. Gascón attended the Oscars ceremony Sunday night, but was not spotted at the Vanity Fair party.

As the night wore on, a waiter nearly tripped on the train of Serena Williams’s lacy, black gown. One guest’s curly hair momentarily got stuck in a decorative topiary, and another attendee dropped a burger on the floor, then picked it back up and took a bite.

At times, the event had the air of a messy office holiday party.

“Come meet Jack,” Margaret Qualley told Stéphanie Guillon, a makeup artist who won an Oscar for her work on “The Substance.”

Ms. Qualley turned around to find that her husband, the producer Jack Antonoff, had vanished.

“Where’d Jack go?” she said. (He was across the patio, chatting with Ms. Kravitz and Natasha Lyonne.)

By 1 a.m., most guests were considering their next moves. Fernanda Torres briefly struggled to find her car in a pickup area clogged with black S.U.V.s.

Conan O’Brien left feeling like his first time hosting the awards ceremony had gone pretty much according to plan.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head. “I did what I wanted to do.”