After Oscars: Time to Shine : El Rescate’s Party With a Twist

El Rescate’s twist on Hollywood’s biggest event is to transform Oscar Night glamour into social consciousness. For the third straight year, the nonprofit organization that aids Central American refugees has ridden Oscar’s coattails to financial success with its Academy Awards viewing party.

“There’s something ironic about combining the substantial issue of America’s relationship to Central America with such a high-glitz operation as the Oscars,” “thirtysomething’s” Peter Horton said.

Better than ironic, it’s profitable. The party at the Mondrian Hotel, underwritten by Reebok, is now El Rescate’s single largest source of income, this year netting $75,000.

This is the most proletarian of the major Oscar parties, with 1,000 supporters paying $100 to dine on buffets donated by 15 local restaurants, rub elbows with stars and view an Oscar telecast in which the commercials are blanked out in favor of political messages from El Rescate. It’s a little disorienting at first to view, say, the presentation of the Irving Thalberg Award followed by a scene of helicopter gunships firing on civilians in El Salvador, but longtime Oscar viewers are inured to the bizarre.

In fact the political messages seemed lost on the crowd that overflowed the hotel’s first-floor bar and patio area where a seemingly endless supply of the most trendy of edibles--lamb taquitos, Thai curried oysters, pink caviar spread--was served.

Among those squeezing through the throng were Jane Fonda with Ted Turner, Tom Hayden, honorary chairman Esai Morales, Rob Lowe, Elizabeth Perkins, Katey Sagal, Edward James Olmos, Alfre Woodard, producer Joel Silver, Viacom’s Tom Tannenbaum, Elizabeth Montgomery, Robert Foxworth, Bob Geldorf, as well as Jackson Browne and Stephen Stills.

Howard Hesseman took a look at the packed room and remarked that “we’re in a room full of people in tuxedos which to me just says everybody’s pretending to be an adult. But that’s probably true at Swifty’s party as well.”