Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Oscar season is usually a hectic time for Tonya Crooks, a celebrity make-up artist known in Hollywood for her skill at sculpting eyebrows. The two-month run-up to the Academy Awards is typically filled with screenings, parties and other promotional events that create constant demand for perfect make-up and brows. “I always see my work at the Oscars on TV,” says Crooks, owner of the BrowGal boutique in West Hollywood. But several Oscar celebrations were cancelled or scaled back this year due to the catastrophic LA fires that broke out in January, displacing nearly 13,000 households and causing an estimated $250bn in damage. Crooks says her business has also been “devastated”. “I’ve been so uncontrollably busy in Oscar season [in the past], but now it feels like just another day,” she says. Crooks is part of a large, often unseen ecosystem that keeps Hollywood’s glitz machine humming, a group that includes caterers, restaurateurs, florists, party planners, hairstylists, DJs and staffing agencies. The Oscars are the biggest performance of the year for them, too. Last year’s Oscar weekend celebration was typically lavish. Talent agency WME threw an extravagant party at a sprawling 25-room Beverly Hills mansion once owned by William Randolph Hearst. United Talent Agency had a crowded, celebrity-filled bash at Soho House on the same evening. But this year WME will hold a much smaller, “intimate” toast only for its clients who are nominated for an Oscar. UTA has cancelled its party altogether and will direct donations to fire relief causes instead. Creative Artists Agency is having a clients-only event. Universal, the studio behind Oscar-nominated Wicked, cancelled a party in January but held an event for its nominees on Wednesday. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group behind the Oscars, scrubbed its annual star-studded luncheon on February 10 and instead held its dinner for nominees this week. A person close to the academy points out the Oscars event is employing more than 5,000 people for several weeks around the event. Helena Brioschi, vice-president of StaffworkX, a service that provides waiters and bartenders for events in LA, says the abbreviated awards season has cut her business by 40 per cent from this time last year. But she understands why some studios and agencies pulled back on the parties.“We have to be respectful of the fact that a lot of people don’t feel like celebrating right now,” she says. Brioschi’s clients are advising her to be patient and trying to reassure her that things will pick up soon. “But if I look at my March schedule, I want to cry,” she says. “It doesn’t look good. I have staff calling in asking: ‘Hey, do you have any work?’”However, she will be sending more than 100 workers to an Oscars event this weekend, and there will still be after-parties thrown by Netflix, Vanity Fair, Madonna and Guy Oseary and the late-night party thrown by Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Like others dependent on business from LA’s entertainment industry, Brioschi sees the current hardship as the latest in a run of bad luck that Hollywood cannot seem to shake. The Covid-19 pandemic shut down production and closed cinemas in 2020 and 2021. A nascent recovery was halted by two lengthy strikes in 2023, leading to a shortage of movies and a poor year at the box office last year. Now, the fires. “Every other year we have drama,” she says. Crooks says the strikes brought her business to a “screeching halt” and she has struggled to recover since. “I would say that my business was easily cut in half” by the strikes, she says. “Since the fires, it’s even more devastated. It’s like we’re getting hit with a one-two punch.” The downturn in Hollywood productions since the strikes means that a lot of Crooks’ customers — set decorators, clothing stylists and other “below the line” workers — can no longer afford her services. “If they’re not working, we’re not working,” she says. “So it’s been debilitating.” The standstill has also been felt in LA’s restaurants — a key barometer of how business is going in Hollywood, where industry gossip is often swapped at lunch over a $30 Cobb salad with grilled chicken. Even before the fires, people were not eating out as much, restaurateurs say. Much of that is due to cost-cutting at the Hollywood studios, which are still struggling to adjust to the new economics of streaming. “Business as usual hasn’t been business as usual for a while,” says Hans Röckenwagner, co-owner of Dear John’s, Dear Jane’s and Röckenwagner Bakery. “Typically you would have a lot of Christmas parties and there were none this past year — no private parties, no parties of 20, no office parties.”However, Michelle Pesce, a DJ who has been performing at Hollywood events for more than 20 years, says she detected an improvement in the mood sometime around the Golden Globes awards on January 5. “There were good vibes around the Globes and it felt like we had some momentum there,” she says. But the fires broke out two days later, and everything stopped. “We didn’t have one corporate event in Los Angeles from Golden Globes weekend until February 10,” says Pesce, who also runs Nona Entertainment, a business that manages other DJs who perform at corporate events. “It was insane.”Pesce has three DJ events booked for Oscars weekend, less than usual, but she understands the pressures that businesses — and people — are feeling in LA now. “The budgets are affected, and I think everyone is a little traumatised in Los Angeles,” she says. “So being social might feel a little weird.” But she is trying to impress upon her clients that cancelling parties is not the best way to help LA recover from the fires.“I keep telling people, if you want to help LA, keep your events, keep your productions in LA,” she says. “The way to help is to have parties here and to be social and spend money in Los Angeles.”
