The Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue Cover Ain't What It Used to Be

Plus: There are no pilots! The new One Day is good! And the algorithm gets it right.

Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue Is More Sparsely Populated Than Usual

I’m not clear on how far ahead Vanity Fair plans its Hollywood issues, which are typically — but not universally — populated with candidates for the Academy Awards and to a lesser extent the SAGs (hence the TV presence). But it’s almost certainly done before we know which way the wind is blowing with the Oscars, which may be why May December is represented twice but Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fall got blanked — although so did Oppenheimer, which surprises me way more from Vanity Fair than the corresponding lack of Barbie.

The cover is the traditional trifold, but with just a few clusters of celebs posing together rather than being arranged in a crowded group, either by logistics or by Photoshop. Vanity Fair posted enough videos and behind-the-scenes pictures on Instagram to make it clear that each of these three pods did show up on-set together. Somehow, though, the effort to have groups of three and four in the same…