Cannes in amFAR this year? A shit show, from what the pictures tell us. And pictures are what amFAR is about.
For the first time in two decades, no stars from movies at the Cannes Film Festival showed up at the Eden Roc. No one from Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” the Elton John biopic “Rocketman,” or Quentin Tarantino’s star-packed “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
The gala could have been held anywhere, for any reason. It had nothing to do with the Cannes Film Festival. Quel dommage!
amFAR didn’t even have Sharon Stone, whom they have treated so shabbily in recent years. Without Stone, former president Kenneth Cole, or Harvey Weinstein (who brought stars like Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger in years past), amFAR in Cannes was reduced to the rubble of Kardashians and Pamela Anderson.
To be fair, I noticed two Oscar winners: Christoph Waltz and Adrien Brody. But they are not currently involved in the film festival.
Some other well known women, like Eva Longoria and Andie McDowell, were there promoting L’Oreal.
But there was no Leo, Brad, Margot, Quentin– and they were all or had just been staying on the property. There was certainly no Elton John, who has his own AIDS Foundation and is touring his farewell concert. There wasn’t even Naomi Campbell. Even she smelled the organization’s stale death.
There wasn’t even Tilda Swinton, who’d been around all week at various events.
I remember the heyday of amFAR in Cannes, when Elton concertized for Liz Taylor and Calvin Klein, Sharon Stone conducted the auction.
Now: pffft. And for the second year in a row, the amFAR organizers, who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves, didn’t both announcing how much the annual dinner earned for AIDS research. CEO Kevin Frost, who makes over $600,000 a year, is still counting the receipts from 2018! Forget 2019!
