CANNES, France -- Liberace fluttered into the Cannes Film Festival this morning and graced the masses with the heartfelt Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s directorial swan song and a touching May-December love story between Mr. Showmanship (Michael Douglas) and Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), his longtime arm-candy companion. (American audiences with a good cable package or their friend’s HBO-to-Go password can watch it this Sunday night.) Mr. Douglas is astonishing in a deeply committed, vanity-free performance as the effeminate, wildly successful and flamboyantly closeted piano player; and Mr. Damon brings true pathos to his role as Liberace’s unhappy boy toy. Delightfully outrageous while almost never feeling campy, with a beautiful script by Richard LaGravenese, Candelabra is the first true gay-marriage drama, an apt romance for the Obama Age where homosexuality, bedazzled as it may be in this outré ’70s-’80s period piece, is never presented as alien or perverse. (Probably the most scandalous part of this film is seeing how much Liberace loved to cook at home for Scott and sit on the couch cuddling over a bowl of popcorn.) This is a fractured fairy tale about two lonely souls, not a True Hollywood Story of immoral decline, and the result is all the more resonant.

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. (Getty Images)

The press conference afterwards was aptly emotional (though still properly ribald), with Mr. Douglas clearly choking up about the chance to play this part. “It was right after my cancer, and this beautiful gift was handed to me,” he said after a pause to hold back tears. “And I'm eternally grateful to Steve and Matt and Richard for waiting for me."

The occasion was also a sentimental one for Mr. Soderbergh, who won the Palme d’Or here in Cannes in 1989 for his debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. "At the end of the day, it's really about two people in a room,” he pointed out about Candelabra. “And that was what my first film was about." He even reminisced with longtime Cannes moderator Henri Behar, who had been in that same conference room with him more than two decades ago. “My hair was darker," Mr. Behar said. "And I had hair!" added Mr. Soderbergh.

Mr. Damon laughed with the press about his many scenes between the sheets with Mr. Douglas. “I now have things in common with Sharon Stone and Glenn Close and Demi Moore,” he said. “It's great. We can all go out and trade stories.” But the main focus of attention was Mr. Damon’s revealing performance—especially the Brazilian spray tan he had gotten for the part. "The world really needed to see this,” said Mr. Soderbergh, who deliberately exploited (with Mr. Damon’s encouragement) the Oscar winner’s derrière, skinny tan lines and all. “Tonight, we'll see it on the biggest screen ever, which is jarring,” laughed Mr. Damon. “This is something you can't unsee. It will be seared into your memory."

Another hit in Cannes, which premiered last night, is an equally delightful look at excess. You want spiritual decadence? Look no further than The Great Beauty. A major revelation and one of the great triumphs of the festival, Paolo Sorrentino’s deliriously louche take on existential despair in the sumptuous bosom of Rome is a 21^st century version of La Dolce Vita, a swirling ode to the Eternal City that will make art-house audiences swoon. At last night’s press screening, virtually the entire crowd, floored by the film, sat in stunned silence through the entirety of the placid end credits—an almost unheard-of occurrence at a festival that prides itself on stampedes from one screening to the next.

Ryan Gosling. (Getty Images)

The suave Italian actor Toni Servillo plays Mastroianni’s celluloid heir, a 65-year-old journalist named Jep Gambardella with an early-career literary novella under his belt and no accomplishments other than attending debauched bacchanales ever since. And as acquaintances, friends and lovers drop like flies, Jep wanders the corridors of Roman high society in search of an enduring connection that will moor him to the world. “Roots are important,” says a Mother Teresa doppelgänger who crosses paths with Jep, in a turn that’s simultaneously satiric and haunting—a tone that Sorrentino astonishingly maintains throughout the film with a self-assurance that makes his high-wire balancing act seem effortless. It’s a perfectly tailored suit of a film, made with the most supple material and cut with masterful lines.

Less than a week remains at the Cannes Film Festival, but major titles are still to unspool, including tomorrow morning’s world premiere of Only God Forgives, Ryan Gosling’s reteaming with his professional BBF, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. Their last effort was the cool-as-ice crime caper Drive; this one is their martial-arts revenge flick. Harvey Weinstein unveiled a few minutes of footage on the Croisette last Friday that made jaws drop, including a quick snippet of Oscar-nominee Kristin Scott-Thomas as a domineering matriarch with a baroque potty mouth (“How many cocks can you entertain in that cute little cum dumpster of yours?” she meows at her son’s sexy date). Further transgressions await.

Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 East 42nd Street, reception at 6:30pm, dinner and program at 7:30pm, after party at 10:30pm, tickets and information can be found at http://snowflake.unicefusa.org/snowflake-ball/

It is unclear whether Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones kept their legs uncrossed ...

“Please return to your seats!”

The typical orders were barked from the front row at Michael Kors on Wednesday, September 12 at 10 a.m. Too much too early. Due to some recent Team Kors PR shifts and rifts, we couldn’t locate the familiar faces that would help The Observer with its conquest. Where were Savannah and Lauren to sneak us past the testosterone-pumped security forces void of interpersonal skills who guarded Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and recent Tony-winner Nina Arianda? Yes, it’s true that I, personally would have accosted Ms. Arianda because she was so fabulous in Venus in Fur, but do Broadway stars really warrant a detail to watch cotton blazers and crepe gowns sashay up and down a walkway for 10 minutes?

“Sir, I’m sorry, but you need to take your seat please!” growled the plus-size security goon, leaving me no choice but to traipse back to section A, pondering how on earth he knew my name was “sir.”

So how, exactly, are editors who don't publish the redundant proclamations on trends for their glossy readership supposed to get those juicy interviews we so rely on for cushy page hits? Or even modest news appeal?

As we waited for the show to commence, the only thing deflecting our disappointment at missed interview ops was an unfortunate Michael Kors visuals production staffer kicking us from behind with his obnoxiously pointy boots.

“Uncross your legs and please push in your bags, ladies and gentlemen in the front row!” screeched the photography pit repeatedly. (I don’t mean to get all political ... maybe it's fine for the ladies, but frankly, forcing 200 men at a fashion show to uncross their legs sounds to me like a gay rights issue!)

Hoot, holler, belt they did, until they deemed the runway bony-leg- and Céline-bag-free enough to their liking.

Knees stayed firmly together as look No. 36 walked down at Michel Kors.

Finally the production began, and thankfully our misery was quelled within the first four looks. Mr. Kors trod the familiar  with American sportswear, this season with vague waves at the sport of golf, and crisp and clean nautical references—all with a wearable ’60s touch. Get your stripes now, people! First Marc Jacobs had people just shy of orgasm with his Edie-meets-’60s contemporary pieces, and Kors too laid the stripes on thick. Especially memorable was a studded navy plunger shift dress, which had edge. The collection had more European commercial appeal, a smart move as the now-colossal brand expands more there and in Asia. One sky print on tops and dresses was created from a picture Michael Kors had taken himself. And for evening? Mr. Kors kept things signature and simple with body-con crepe dresses with geo cutouts. As Karlie Kloss prowled down the catwalk, our seatmate whispered, “Crepe never looked sexier!”

It was true. And the punchy color palette was a stylist’s dream. There were pocketing and stitching details that added value and youth … perhaps a bit too much, said a few. The Observer overheard Jamee Gregory commenting to another UES Queen that she actually liked the youthfulness of the collection, “It was very nice, actually,” she said before debating a swim upstream to kiss-kiss Mr. Kors backstage; as this editor watched her go, he crossed my legs.

Let's compare it with all of the upcoming presidential flicks! In its depiction of a discrete period of time, Reykjavik sounds more like this winter's Hyde Park on Hudson (showing a summit between Bill Murray, as Franklin Roosevelt, and the British royals) than Lincoln (taking on the final period of the life of Honest Abe, as embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis). It sounds nothing like The Butler, next year's historical freakout wherein John Cusack will play Richard Nixon, Robin Williams will play Dwight Eisenhower, Liev Schreiber will play Lyndon Johnson ... et cetera.

Gordon Gekko's PSA

Insider trading is a real thing! So if any of your friends are starting to look like Buddy Fox to you, please call the federal bureau of investigation immediately.

Apparently, doing this little favor for the FBI will have no effect on the long-term prison sentence of Mr. Douglas' son, Cameron Douglas.

Meryl Streep, Oscar presenter (Getty Images)

The Academy has released an incomplete list of this weekend's Oscar presenters. Based on past experience, what categories shall they present. Here are our best guesses!

Christian Bale will present Best Supporting Actress; Melissa Leo will present Best Supporting Actor; Colin Firth will present Best Actress; Natalie Portman will present Best Actor. This gender-swapping return of last year's winners is a predictable tradition; the only thing surprising about it is that Melissa Leo won an Oscar one year ago instead of eight, which is how long ago it feels.

Halle Berry will present Best Documentary Feature and Short. This seems like her level of fame right now.

The cast of Bridesmaids will present Best Costume Design. Because women can make jokes about dresses!

Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone will present Best Sound Editing and Mixing. Only two charming young(ish, in Mr. Cooper's case) stars can get us excited about two seemingly indistinguishable categories.

Tom Cruise will present Best Picture. Doesn't it seem sort of weird that he never has? And doesn't it seem as though he's been fully rehabilitated?

Penélope Cruz will present Best Cinematography. Sure!

Cameron Diaz will present Best Art Direction. This is the sort of early-in-the-ceremony category for which it's perfect to have on hand an early-2000s star whose rep couldn't arrange something later in the ceremony.

Michael Douglas will present Best Director. He's already presented Best Picture twice but he's still a pretty prestigious guy. Practice saying "Hazanavicius," Gekko!

Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis will present Best Visual Effects. And do some sort of Rise of the Planet of the Apes-themed skit in the process.

Tina Fey will present Best Makeup. And tell a joke about how much makeup it takes to keep her from looking like either a wrinkled old man or an acne-scarred teenager in the process.

Tom Hanks will present the "In Memoriam" montage. He can't present Best Picture because one of his own films is nominated (the Academy's actually done this before when Jack Nicholson presented the prize to The Departed, but let's hope they learned from how gauche that looked) and his presenting Best Director would only call attention to the fact that he directed Larry Crowne last year. The only other thing someone with all Mr. Hanks's gravitas can do is present this segment.

Angelina Jolie will present Best Foreign Language Film. What a wonderful way for her to seem benevolent in defeat after not having been nominated for her own foreign film (which was not eligible in this category).

Jennifer Lopez will present Best Original Song. A theoretical actress and theoretical singer, Jennifer Lopez is the perfect simulacrum of a presenter of a music category at the Oscars.

Meryl Streep will present Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay. "For actors [giggle, stern look over glasses], it all begins with a script," the star of The Iron Lady will inaccurately say.

What the second Wall Street wants to do, to the surprise of moviegoers expecting a rollicking pinstriped adventure, is tell the sludgy story of the financial crisis. But it doesn't know how. Oliver Stone's opus is a strangely fictionalized version of the death of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but also the rise of short sellers and Goldman Sachs. That makes it, two years after the climax of the subprime debacle, the first big pop-culture meditation on Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and Ace Greenberg, with some Steve Eisman, Maria Bartiromo and Matt Taibbi thrown in, too. Figuring out what is supposed to be what, and who is really who, should be one of the fall's great parlor games.

But the real surprise is that the Oliver Stone film, as it's called on the beautiful poster, is gentle and forgiving. Greed is bad, and then--consider this a spoiler alert--it isn't. Our heroes are Shia LaBeouf's trader, Jake Moore, more or less a conniving liar, and Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko, introduced as a sage, revealed to be a cackling supervillain, and then given a chance to make good at midnight. The movie doesn't seem to mind that the men win because of theft, irresponsibility, avarice and old-fashioned treachery.

The new Wall Street is a love song to 21st-century traders, disguised as a diatribe.

"WE DIDN'T MAKE it too complex," Oliver Stone said last week, during an interview at noon on Rosh Hashanah. "It's just so fucking difficult." But there are a lot of details packed into the film that ring true. In its best speech, Gekko warns a college audience about the upcoming mortgage collapse. "You don't know it yet, but you're the NINJA generation--no income, no job, no assets," he says, using the nickname for the subprime loans that brokers pushed on unemployed homeowners, which became securities that were traded back and forth.

"Like cancer, it's a disease, and we have to fight back," he says, growing more furious when he describes how his bartender bought three houses he couldn't afford. That's a reference to Steve Eisman, one hedge fund manager who railed against the subprime mortgage bubble, and who realized that his nanny had bought up five townhouses in Queens. (His housekeeper was even going to buy a townhouse with an adjustable rate mortgage and a low down payment, until he convinced her otherwise.)

The film's smart connections to the real-life story of the bubble are as subtle as the high-thread Bowery Hotel sheets that Jake wakes up in when we meet him, nuzzled by Carey Mulligan's Winnie, his girlfriend and Gekko's estranged daughter. But there are bigger links. "We did have scenes with AIG, by the way," Mr. Stone said. "We had the chairman, [Maurice] Greenberg, but I ended up cutting it out because, frankly, it was too complex for the average viewer."

Others made it in. Keller-Zabel, the doomed firm Jake works for, is Bear Stearns, complete with a "bald guy wearing a bow tie," as Bear chairman Ace Greenberg once called himself, at the helm. It's Frank Langella's kindly Lew Zabel, a father figure to Jake, who gets a warm kiss on his pate after awarding him an early million-dollar bonus. There's even a reference to the resentment that lingered on Wall Street ten years after Bear Stearns refused to participate in the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

Bear ended up needing the kind of help it had refused to give, which, of course, is Zabel's fate, too. "Two bucks? Jesus, you're out of your mind," he spits when Churchill Schwartz's Brolin makes an offer to save the firm, the same as JPMorgan's bid for Bear Stearns. The sum goes up after haggling, which is what happened in 2008, sort of, although reality was more sinister. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon actually wanted to pay more so that Bear Stearns' shareholders wouldn't get in the way, but Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson reportedly asked him to keep the price low, so the government-backed deal wouldn't look like a bailout.

SEE ALSO: 10 WALL STREET SUPERSTITIONS

Indeed, Mr. Brolin looks like Mr. Dimon, only without the gray hair. But Churchill Schwartz doesn't look like JPMorgan for long. By the time we see a black helicopter with its CS logo, just a line of paint away from GS, the firm has morphed into the great Goldman. "Talk about an evil empire," one character sighs. In the interview last week, Mr. Stone even claimed that Eliot Spitzer was the one who told him that Goldman Sachs was betting against the housing market at the same time it was creating mortgage deals. "This was before it made the news!" he said. "That woke me up, and I said, 'My God, that's some story.'"

By the finale, there isn't any doubt about the firm's inspiration. "The first thing you need to know about Churchill Schwartz is that it's everywhere," the opening line of a bombshell exposé posted to Winnie's Web site says. Her site is called Frozen Truth, which will be a boon to the real-life Canadian named Apollo Lemmon who writes a blog with that name. But her article, of course, is Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone classic, which begins, "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere."

"THE ARTICLE CAME out after the movie was shot," Mr. Stone protested. "Come on! Please." In fact, he's been strange about most of the film's inspirations. Telling The Hollywood Reporter about one bank they shot in, he said it "gave us the right feeling that we needed for Goldman--I don't want to say Goldman, I want to say 'from The Bank' in the film." Mr. LaBeouf is less self-conscious. "I was able to get into the Goldman Sachs office, which is like the Illuminati. Nobody gets to go in there," he recently bragged on camera. "Basically the trade-off was you get me in there, I'll introduce you to Gekko."

Asked in May by Reuters whether the material would be a lightening rod, Mr. Stone sidestepped the question by saying the film was really based on the "solid relationships" between the characters. "We didn't make it about 2008, that was background for me," he said last week. "And it is a serious background, but it's not the movie. It could have been done in another era."

It's not that he's afraid of a lawsuit: At a lunch that The Times wrote about recently, the filmmaker even tried to say there was "a little bit" of Robert Rubin, the former Citigroup chairman, in Brolin's executive.

So is Lew Zabel Ace Greenberg? "I would say he's a combination of tough, hardened Jewish traders who have been in Wall Street over the years," Mr. Stone said last week. Is the shot of the Lipstick Building outside of Zabel's headquarters a nod to Madoff, who ran his scheme there? "It was a happy coincidence," he said. Does Mr. Brolin's banker resemble Jamie Dimon in the first half of the film? "Don't do that to me! You can say there's an archetype of handsome, slick and relatively unscathed by time," Mr. Stone said.

Maybe there's so much slipperiness because his movie's mixed message about its characters and their dishonesty is not what its director would want to say about the real people behind the financial crisis. The sweet Zabel turns out to be psychotically negligent; Gekko gets evil not long after his inspiring speech; and even his daughter is hiding something awfully large. One character complains that CNBC's stars sell fear and panic, but a gaggle of them get cameos. And it's our young hero who spreads a false rumor through a network of short sellers (which earns him a great new job), lies to his fiancé, scares her into doing something awful with Swiss money and is even slightly dishonest when he comes clean at the end.

Even Jake's abiding passion for green technology investments can't help but seem suspect by the end. "I'm doing it to make money," the playboy Vincent Tchenguiz once told a reporter who asked about the conflict between his environmental investments and six SUVs. "The numbers are colossal." The producers talked to him for inspiration.

TWO YEARS AFTER the death of Lehman, and 30 months since Bear's demise, we've had a few great books about the crisis, a nine-volume autopsy of Lehman from its bankruptcy court, a half-billion-dollar Goldman fine with no admission of guilt, Congressional hearings featuring calm non-apologies and now a huge Hollywood film. What we don't have is a way to talk seriously or consistently about the people and companies responsible for the worst financial collapse in a century.

The best the second Wall Street does is present powerful people who are, mostly, good but bad. "That's what it's about," Mr. Stone said. "How money makes you compromised these days. How money taints all our behavior."

If money corrupts, then maybe it's unfair to expect too much from a $70 million Hollywood thriller that features Bvlgari rings (Jake wants to know about the extra-special private Bvlgari collection in the back); the original Wall Street's Charlie Sheen, who had his own makeup artist on set for his brief cameo; and a beer advertisement. "Heineken?" Gekko asks his future son-in-law at a Shun Lee dinner. "Yeah," he answers, before we got a shot of him with the bottle, like Mike Myers jokingly smiling with a Pepsi can in Wayne's World.

They're at Shun Lee for a dinner with Winnie, who, after her father interrupts their conversation to sweet-talk Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter, gets up and leaves. She's back by the end of the film, where the credits roll over a happy outdoor party for a 1-year-old, featuring a live band. "Guys like that, having birthday parties," Mr. Stone told The Times in the Four Seasons, nodding at Steve Schwarzman, "it's not my deal."

mabelson@observer.com

SEE ALSO: THE CAREY-MULLIGAN-MATT TAIBBI HYBRID SPEAKS!

The genealogy of the insult was firmly established in the history of the world. Your tribe-your "people"-guaranteed sameness of experience. You and they shared physical characteristics, language and idiom, customs and culture, geographical place, chains of friends and acquaintances. Purity of context meant consistency of experience. Homogeneity protected you against life's terrible shocks and jolts. Dirt was "out there." Your house rose from the dirt; if you fell behind in life's race, you would fall in the dirt; you yourself came from the dirt and would be buried in it. The "other"-the inexplicable stranger, the blow from outside, the shock from nowhere-was, in his or her inimical alienness, essentially dirt.

Our great blessing is that this fearful mythologizing of the other that hangs around the world's neck has mostly vanished in America. Tribal virulence is still a potent force in this country, but its anathemas are not as visceral. To call anyone "dirty" somehow feels self-conscious and outdated. Even bigots have to see the multicultural world in multicultural colors now, whether they like it or not. We are so beautifully saturated with otherness everywhere we look that dirt itself is unavailable to quavering psyches as a metaphor. In multicultural America, dirt is simply a literal, morally neutral fact.

Well, maybe not so morally neutral at that. Soil is the new dirt, and soil is good. (The old, bad dirt has become germs and bacteria-out of sight, out of mind, until the next scare of terrorism or disease.) The organic movement could well be the sign of a more cosmopolitan society. Rather than feeling surrounded by dirt against which we have to protect ourselves, more and more of us believe that our environment abounds in soil in which we can sow better futures. As we have grown to feel comfortable with all sorts of different-seeming people, we have learned that dirt is the unifying origin of life, not merely its reducing finale. As the "other" has become us, dirt has become soil.

Even the identification of urban areas with dirt, and the suburbs or the country with cleanliness or at least less dirt, is now passé. New York as a "dirty" place is so '70s-so, you know, Kojak. No doubt the city is in better hygienic shape than it was in that depressed, recessionary decade, but Gotham is still as grimy as any bustling capital of the world. Yet no one nowadays would think of applying "dirty" pejoratively to New York. The city is too expensive to live in, for one thing. But the variegated wholeness of the five boroughs has changed in other ways, too. Consider Kojak again. In the recent revival of that old TV series, the egregiously ethnic (read: tribal) Telly Savalas was replaced by the black, "differently" named Ving Rhames. American cities are less and less divided into tribal enclaves. As the idea of aliens inhabiting another neighborhood has dissipated, so has the conception of New York-and any great American city-as a dangerous, "dirty" place.

Of course, along with the negative meaning, the positive connotations of dirt have vanished, too. If the other was repulsively dirty, the other was also deliciously dirty. That's because sex was once publicly held to be dirty, and so sex with the dirty other was exponentially more exciting and fulfilling. Now sex itself has famously lost its thrilling association with dirt. This is too bad because human beings need what the philosopher Jean Wahl once called "transcendence downward." We need to be able to mock death by re-creating its deconstruction of our routine and material lives and then recovering our ordinariness once again. You get "down and dirty," and then it's a shower and clean clothes and back to work again on Monday.

Not anymore. As we've become a "society of the spectacle," to borrow a phrase; as we've grown accustomed to spending most of our time watching our computer screens, and our iPad screens, and our iPhone screens, and our TV screens, and our movie screens, the essence of pornography-watching as the pleasure principle-has become the normal crux of our days. Sex was once the epitome of dirt because sex is the total merging of familiar experience with the alienness of the other. But now, with the routinization of pornography, sex has become the new purity-you spend the weekend with your iThings, and then it's a shower and clean clothes and back to pornography on your computer at work on Monday. Pornography makes sex antiseptic and severs contact with the other. Solipsism is the new tribalism.

Follow the revolutions in the career of dirt and you encounter one "new" reality after another. Here's the final one: Movie violence is the new movie sex. With the normalization of pornography's isolated rituals of sex, sex no longer has a place in the context of story or character. The untitillating boredom of sex as part of a character's life and a plot is certainly why violence has a wider appeal than sex to the teenagers who make up the global market for movies. Who wants to figure out the motivations driving Sharon Stone's character in Basic Instinct when you can just watch some blonde screwing some guy on one of a zillion Web sites? What used to be called "sex scenes" are being phased out of American movies, even as computer-generated images are making American violence as aesthetically refined as Japanese violence. Indeed, ever since John Malkovich put Clint Eastwood's gun in his mouth in In the Line of Fire, movie violence has acquired the stylistics of movie sex.

But then, unlike sex, violence has never been considered dirty. Rather, violence has always been how you "clean" up the "dirt." Dirty Harry was culturally immaculate, remember? Now he's Pixelated Harry, and that violence in which he specialized has almost banned sex from film. Maybe we haven't come so far after all.

editorial@observer.com

My epiphany came last week while reading A Time to Be Born, the late Dawn Powell’s searing satire about two gals clawing their way to the top in prewar N.Y.C. Halfway through the book, one of the characters realizes that the key to social success is a certain remoteness, and that “the public does not like its idols to be folksy.” Darn! No wonder I’m not being idolized.

Take last week, for instance: On the night of Monday, April 19, I skipped off to the SCAD (Savannah College Of Art and Design) Etoile awards, where my Jonny was performing the role of emcee. Movie star Michael Douglas was sitting directly behind me, looking composed but sad, as you might when you know that one of your kids is about to become extraordinarily unavailable, courtesy of the prison system. (His troubled lad Cameron got a five-year-plus-parole sentence for drug-dealing the following day.)

Delighted though I was to be in such close proximity to Kirk’s talented and still-good-looking son, I was scanning the horizon for another celeb, Etoile honoree du soir, Catherine Deneuve. My newfound realizations about the perils of folksy availability have only fueled my interest in meeting the fabulously blank cinematic icon. I am happy to report that she exceeded my expectations by being even more glacial and remote than usual. In fact, she never showed up at all. She was stuck in Paris, wreathed in Icelandic ash and Gitanes smoke.

Instead, we had Fergie, the only person on earth other than Richard Simmons who is actually more folksy and available than myself. The likable Duchess of York bopped onto the stage to receive an award for ash-bound David “Shanghai” Tang. Memo to me: Filling in to pick up other people’s awards for them is the ne plus ultra of folksy availability.

Tuesday night found me surrounded by iconic foodies—Batali, Lagasse, Colicchio—at the Foodbank fund-raiser at Chelsea Piers. Nothing says “folksy availability” quite like an iconic chef. Here is a milieu where down-to-earth affability is not just acceptable, it is positively de rigueur.

In this sea of gourmandizing jollity, the less-folksy non-foodie celebs stood out like sore thumbs: Salman Rushdie, U2’s the Edge and Helena Christensen maintained a certain air of unavailability by intermittently withdrawing from the general frivolity throughout the evening. They accomplished this by pulling out their phones and embarking on bouts of scrolling and texting, smiling creepily all the while. (It’s the smiling that works my folksy nerves.)

As somebody who regards the phone as an annoying appliance for conveying bad news and problems—“SD, you need to rewrite the copy on the Prada ad”—I find the contemporary mania for 24-hour phone diddling to be not just deeply naff but also wildly incomprehensible. Why check your emails when it’s never good news? I guess it provides the perpetrator with some kind mystique-enhancing moment of squishy self-involvement. It certainly communicates unfolksy unavailability. Memo to self: In the future, intermittently ignore those around you, pull out your phone and grin mysteriously while fumbling with the buttons.

On Thursday night, my Jonny and I went to support his author-economist brother, David Adler. (He wrote that book Snap Judgment, a spunky and highly readable challenge to the whole Gladwellian belief in spontaneous decision making.) Mr. Adler has produced a behavioral finance documentary called Mind Over Money, which was premiering at the Museum of Finance on Wall Street (it airs this week on PBS Nova).

During the Nova-sponsored post-movie panel discussion, I had little or no idea what anyone was talking about. Then, mercifully, the topic of shopping came up, accompanied by a nugget of truly startling information. Brace yourselves! According to Harvard professor Jennifer Lerner, women are disinclined to shop when they are frightened or angry—hence the plunge in purchases after Wall Street crashes or terrorist attacks—but more inclined to shop when they feel sad.

OMG! The rest of the week is a blur. After hearing this game-changing tidbit, my retailer’s brain skipped off down the rabbit hole and began concocting ever more baroque ways to make customers mournful, preferably without them realizing it. What if we dressed little children à la Oliver Twist and stationed them at the various entrances to Barneys? What if we piped in Andy Williams singing “Autumn Leaves” over and over again? The customers might shop their brains out, but what would be the effect on the salespeople? Maybe they would go all limp and suicidal and be unable to help the weeping-but-shopaholic customers?

Let’s end on a sad note and see if it catapults you, dear reader, into a clothes-buying frenzy. Here goes. True fact: Despite being a total genius—she was Hemingway’s favorite writer—Dawn Powell died uncelebrated and was buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island. Now go shop!

sdoonan@observer.com

"Lady Gaga?" asked another reporter.

"No, no. Ooooh, yes! Dita Von Teese, love her. She's the real thing."

The flame-haired Ms. Zemeckis descended the stairs robed in a floor-length metallic brocade gown, a matching brocade stole, black fishnets glimmering through the thigh-high slit and a tiara perched on her crown. She was accompanied by her husband, Robert, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump in 1994. "I give her a few ideas," he said.

"You know, Leslie, Sharon [Stone] and I have the same manager, Chuck Binder, so we all know each other through him," actor Steve Guttenberg told the Transom-other Binder clients are Robert Wagner, Jacqueline Bisset and Daryl Hannah-"and I've heard from him how talented Leslie is, so I wanted to come. And I was excited Sharon was in town. We did Police Academy 4 together. Whenever she's in town, a big 'S' is written in the sky."

Ms. Stone arrived also in fishnets, a sleek Dior tweed suit dress and bicep-length black leather gloves. "An evening about striptease and nudity," she said, introducing the film. "I couldn't imagine why they asked me to host."

After the screening, the whole flock traveled by foot to the 21 Club three blocks away. In a strategically rumpled pink dress shirt and matching hair, Wall Street star Michael Douglas greeted Mr. Zemeckis with a hearty back pat. "Those women were so candid!" he added to Ms. Zemeckis. "You were so good at getting them relaxed." And, during a lull in the conversation, "So, my son is being sentenced tomorrow"--to which the couple responded with somber sympathy.