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.\u00a0The 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. \u201cI always see my work at the Oscars on TV,\u201d says Crooks, owner of the BrowGal boutique in West Hollywood.\u00a0But 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 \u201cdevastated\u201d.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve been so uncontrollably busy in Oscar season [in the past], but now it feels like just another day,\u201d she says.\u00a0Crooks is part of a large, often unseen ecosystem that keeps Hollywood\u2019s 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.\u00a0Last year\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0But this year WME will hold a much smaller, \u201cintimate\u201d 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.\u00a0Creative 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. \u00a0Helena 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.\u201cWe have to be respectful of the fact that a lot of people don\u2019t feel like celebrating right now,\u201d she says. Brioschi\u2019s clients are advising her to be patient and trying to reassure her that things will pick up soon. \u201cBut if I look at my March schedule, I want to cry,\u201d she says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t look good. I have staff calling in asking: \u2018Hey, do you have any work?\u2019\u201dHowever, 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 Beyonc\u00e9. Like others dependent on business from LA\u2019s 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. \u201cEvery other year we have drama,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0Crooks says the strikes brought her business to a \u201cscreeching halt\u201d and she has struggled to recover since. \u201cI would say that my business was easily cut in half\u201d by the strikes, she says. \u201cSince the fires, it\u2019s even more devastated. It\u2019s like we\u2019re getting hit with a one-two punch.\u201d\u00a0The downturn in Hollywood productions since the strikes means that a lot of Crooks\u2019 customers \u2014 set decorators, clothing stylists and other \u201cbelow the line\u201d workers \u2014 can no longer afford her services. \u201cIf they\u2019re not working, we\u2019re not working,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it\u2019s been debilitating.\u201d\u00a0The standstill has also been felt in LA\u2019s restaurants \u2014 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even 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.\u00a0\u201cBusiness as usual hasn\u2019t been business as usual for a while,\u201d says Hans R\u00f6ckenwagner, co-owner of Dear John\u2019s, Dear Jane\u2019s and R\u00f6ckenwagner Bakery. \u201cTypically you would have a lot of Christmas parties and there were none this past year \u2014 no private parties, no parties of 20, no office parties.\u201dHowever, 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. \u201cThere were good vibes around the Globes and it felt like we had some momentum there,\u201d she says. But the fires broke out two days later, and everything stopped. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have one corporate event in Los Angeles from Golden Globes weekend until February 10,\u201d says Pesce, who also runs Nona Entertainment, a business that manages other DJs who perform at corporate events. \u201cIt was insane.\u201dPesce\u00a0has three DJ events booked for Oscars weekend, less than usual, but she understands the pressures that businesses \u2014 and people \u2014 are feeling in LA now. \u201cThe budgets are affected, and I think everyone is a little traumatised in Los Angeles,\u201d she says. \u201cSo being social might feel a little weird.\u201d\u00a0But she is trying to impress upon her clients that cancelling parties is not the best way to help LA recover from the fires.\u201cI keep telling people, if you want to help LA, keep your events, keep your productions in LA,\u201d she says. \u201cThe way to help is to have parties here and to be social and spend money in Los Angeles.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0The two-month run-up to the Academy Awards is typically filled with screenings, parties and other promotional events that create constant demand for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225825,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225823\/revisions\/225825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}