By Tom Leonard in Los Angeles Last Updated: 4:06PM GMT 25 Feb 2009  Daniel Craig with his girlfriend, Satsuki Mitchell Photo: GETTY  Either the magazine's famous annual party is very good or the awards ceremony is, well, rather dull.  Uma Thurman, Rachel Weisz and Mick Jagger were all at the Vanity Fair "viewing party" dinner while the Academy Awards were still going. So, too, were Craig and Portman even though both had presented awards early in the ceremony.  Around 700 guests attended the dinner or the subsequent after-show party, despite claims by the organisers that they were paring back the event in keeping with the recessionary times.  The party was certainly held in a smaller venue, the art deco Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. It is traditional at such events for the big winners of the night to hold court with a trail of well-wishers, often equally famous, lining up to offer their congratulations.  In the absence of the Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle, who instead attended his film's own party, the floor at the Vanity Fair party was largely left to Kate Winslet.  Sitting in between her parents on a couch in a corner of the hotel's terrace room, the Best Actress winner clutched her Oscar in one hand as she embraced with the other.  "It's been great, just great," she said, while acknowledging that the Oscar campaigning of recent months had been exhausting. "I'm going to go and hide in a cave now," she added.  Earlier that night, she arrived at the party just as Meryl Streep, her main rival for the award, was leaving. When the pair agreed to pose together for photographers, Streep jokingly took the Oscar statue.  The Vanity Fair party is an institution at the Oscars and the celebrity guest list goes on and on, an impressive but certainly eclectic mix that this year included Madonna, Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz, Rupert Murdoch, Smokey Robinson and Calvin Klein.  Sir Elton John, who hosts the other big annual party, is now able to make the Vanity Fair party after rescheduling his own event a few years ago.  He spent most of the time at the Sunset Tower posing for photographs with strangers, including even some of the Oscar winners.  Winslet left shortly after 2am with her parents and husband, Sam Mendes, manically waving her Oscar one final time at a group of fans screaming from the other side of Sunset Boulevard.
When Oscar ceremony presenters Daniel Craig and Natalie Portman decamp to the    Vanity Fair party before the awards in Los Angeles have even finished, you    can look at it one of two ways.