It all began with a dinner dance. Well, a banquet, really.

Long before Swifty Lazar corralled celebrities to join him at Spago or Graydon Carter reigned over Vanity Fair’s soiree, the Academy Awards were a party held on May 16, 1929, in a ballroom at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. The ceremony lasted barely 15 minutes. The band played all night. What was revealed then would hold true for generations to come: Oscar parties have always been far more entertaining than the awards show itself.

At the Vanity Fair party in 2001, for example, a tipsy Courtney Love marched over to a group of photographers and shouted an expletive after one of Mr. Carter’s gatekeepers refused to let her manager in. A decade later, Sean Young, who starred in the movie “Blade Runner,” was arrested at the Governors Ball, reportedly after she crashed the party and slapped a guard.

On more than one occasion, the evening has ended in fisticuffs. There was the time Richard Johnson, then a Page Six editor, published an item claiming that celebrities planned to boycott the Oscar party of the agent Ed Limato because of his client Mel Gibson. Mr. Gibson’s project “The Passion of the Christ” had recently been criticized as anti-Semitic. Mr. Limato was so insulted he threw a glass of vodka in the editor’s face at — where else? — another Oscar party.

The gatherings are often extravagant and, on occasion, homey affairs. And they reflect the hosts who throw them. Thirty years ago, Dani Janssen, the wife of the actor David Janssen, presided over her Oscar party like a Midwestern den mother, dishing up plates of chicken and vegetable casserole in her Century City penthouse. In the late 1990s, Harvey Weinstein, a founder of Miramax, packed his Oscar parties with ingénues and A-listers to promote his movies. Mr. Weinstein, who is currently being tried on charges that he sexually assaulted two women, has been the subject of more than 90 sexual misconduct allegations.