Celebrities in Hollywood go to three types of parties. First are the dinners, held at another celebrity's house. Then there are the fetes hosted by brands. Third are the benefits. Benefits establish celebrities as serious individuals. On Thursday night, Josh Brolin and Diane Lane co-hosted a Vanity Fair and Dior event for Brandaid, where everybody came out a winner. Lane wore Dior, but she paired it with glasses and looked very serious. The director Paul Haggis gave a speech. He started the organization, which buys art in countries like Haiti, auctions it at higher prices, then sends the money back to the countries where it was originally bought. It's actually rather neat. Still, he said, "Everything is dirt cheap. We wanted to price things in this economy so the value will go up. You will not get deals like this in a couple of months."



Over the last 20 years, Oliver Stone has done biopics on everyone from Nixon to Alexander the Great, to our last president, Bush. We journalists like nothing more than fantasy casting, so we marched up to him at Brandaid on Thursday night and asked Stone who he would pick to play our current obsession: Bernie Madoff.


He didn't miss a beat.


"Dustin Hoffman."


What about the wife? "I'm not sure. I haven't really looked at the pictures of her. Maybe Brenda Fricker. She's Jewish."


Nearby, the environmental organization Global Green threw a concert where Sheryl Crow performed. There was a VIP room teeming with celebrities, among them Kate Bosworth, Heather Graham, Radha Mitchell and Jon Tenney from "The Closer." "I've been involved with the organization since I was 19," Bosworth said. "And I'm currently reading [New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's] 'Hot, Flat and Crowded.' It's amazing."


She was actually delightful.


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