Just a Little Something She Bought in Paris

We’re going off our credit-card diet. After all, look at what Micheline Connery picked up on one of her shopping excursions to Paris--a hit play on both sides of the Atlantic.

The diminutive wife of sexiest senior Sean dished about her great buy at the after-party for Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning “Art,” which opened Tuesday at the UCLA / James A. Doolittle Theatre. She said that when a friend dragged her to see the original French production, she was smitten.

“I was at the Ritz in Paris, and I called Sean and said, ‘I saw a play. We have to have the rights.’ Sean said, ‘OK, if you think it’s so fantastique.’ I was totally in love.”

With the play. OK, with Sean too, not least because Micheline’s honey bunny signed on as a producer. Their son, Stephane, who’s with Sotheby’s in New York, also kicked in some cash, which inspired the auction house to sponsor the actor-packed opening party at Pinot Hollywood.

Micheline is a painter herself, but the Connerys’ love for art wasn’t all that drew her to “Art,” which unspools the friendships among three men after one buys a white-on-white painting. Oddly enough, the play reminded her of a 1987 dinner party the couple attended at the home of Michael Ovitz.

“We go to his house, and [Ovitz] said, ‘I want to show you my latest acquisition.’ It was a white painting. I decided to be very cool, and I said, ‘I think that’s the best work of art you ever bought, Michael.’ And he said, ‘You know there are 50 layers of white.’ I said, ‘It makes all the difference. The painter is a genius, the gallery is a genius and the idiot is you.’

“He was so furious, and I told him the poet Paul Valery said, ‘In the end, the most beautiful work of art could be a blank page,’ although he was talking about literature. I said, ‘If you put those words at the bottom of your white [bleep], it would give some nobility to it.’

“Then in ‘94, I see that play with the white painting, and they talk about Paul Valery, and I thought, ‘That’s for me.’ Spooky.”

P.S. When Micheline told Ovitz this story. “He said, ‘You have to give me the commission now.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ”

Hey, they don’t call him Mike Ovitz for nothing.

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As we meditated over our rubber chicken at the 24th annual L.A. Film Critics Assn. Achievement Awards dinner at the Bel Age Hotel on Wednesday, we realized that critics’ honors are more than mere words.

“When the critics honor you with one of their awards, the tension is broken,” said expert award-winner Steven Spielberg, before snagging the group’s best director and best picture nods for “Saving Private Ryan.” “You’re on parole until your next movie comes out. And then I go through the same spilkus that everybody else goes through.”

When Spielberg and his ilk get a break from their spilkus, there’s room to battle other demons. Formerly blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, who won a career achievement award, fumed over the recent decision of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to honor director Elia Kazan. “I’m not thrilled by the latest action of the Oscar committee, awarding an Oscar to someone who betrayed his friends,” he said.

And what was up with Warren Beatty and “Bulworth” studio Fox? “It’s a funny studio,” Beatty said, accepting the screenplay award with Jeremy Pikser. “As a corporation, they were as straightforward with me as they were good-naturedly and passively contemptuous of the anticorporate themes in the movie. . . . Hutch Parker and Tom Rothman, who couldn’t be more brilliant as executives, have taken the trouble to come here tonight, and I want to thank them. I want to tell them I like them very much. I hope to do a movie with chase sequences . . . in it.” Love ya, babe. Let’s do lunch.

Irene Lacher’s Out and About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2.