Shia LaBeouf. (Patrick McMullan)

"You're amazing," Shia LaBeouf was heard wooing a young woman last night at the top of McKittrick Hotel, at the after-party for the The Cinema Society and Manifesto Yves Saint Laurent screening of Lawless. "You're incredible. You're an astronaut!"

"Did Shia just call that lady an astronaut?" a friend of The Observer asked, confused. If everyone was a tad difficult to understand, we understood, as Lawless had also starred a marble-mouthed Tom Hardy doing an American accent. The actor was regrettably absent from the screening--he was shooting Mad Max in Australia, we were told--which ruined our chances of doing our spot-on Bane impression for him. His loss.

Instead, we called over the hyper-maniac, hyper-masculine Mr. LaBeouf, whom  Harvey Weinstein had praised earlier in the evening as being the love child of himself, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

After all, if it wasn't for Project Greenlight, the early 2000s HBO show that was, in Mr. Weinstein's words, how the trio "gave back" to the young film community after Good Will Hunting, there would be no Shia LaBeouf: the winners of the second season of Hollywood reality contest went on to create The Battle of Shaker Heights, which Mr. Weinstein credited as the Mr. LaBeouf's breakout debut. (He conveniently forgot about Holes, our favorite Shia LaBeouf feature, which premiered several months before Shaker Heights.)

Smoking a cigarette alongside co-star Dane DeHaan, Mr. LaBeouf looked straight out of the ’70s with a beard, brown suit and long hair pulled tightly into a bun. Whenever he spoke, he would rock up and down on the balls of his feet, as if getting ready to sprint away at a moment's notice.

Since Mr. Hardy commanded so much of the film with his mumblecore performance, we asked if Lawless was shot before or after The Dark Knight Rises.

"Before. The shoot was about nine and a half weeks," Mr. LaBeouf replied in a surprisingly deep voice. "Tom was in the middle of bulking up ..."

"He hadn't gained that last 20 pounds of fat yet," Mr. DeHaan joked.

"Ha! Right, exactly. You know what I loved about his character in The Dark Knight?" Mr. LaBeouf asked. "I loved that he was too big to be sexy," he said, increasing the speed of his bouncing. "You know, like he literally had too many muscles to be attractive, so he was just scary. That's how it should be done!"

Mr. LaBeouf then zipped off to admire several other non-astronauts.

The most recent example cited was not The Artist, though that award-winning silent feature was mentioned several times. No sign of Uggie trolling around the Embassy either, though during our search we did run into Dan Abrams and Dave Zinczenko. Mr. Abrams gently corrected our congratulations on his new site about celebrity chefs after we mistakenly claimed to have read the news in The New York Post.

"No, I don't think so...The New York Times had a story on it, though," Mr. Abrams said, politely swerving our faux pas. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. So about Harvey Weinstein and this party...

Technically, the Moet & Chandon celebratory toast to Mr. Weinstein was being held in honor of his acceptance of the Legion d'honneur, an award created by Napoleon Bonaparte. It was not an an after-party to Mr. Weinstein's latest oversees acquisition, The Intouchables. But leave it to the entrepreneur to find a way to combine what essentially amounts to a knighthood with a marketing tie-in. The film had screened earlier that evening at the Paley Center, where Bette Midler, Hammish Bowles, and Fabiola Beracasa (proudly sporting her baby bump) gave the portly producer cheek kisses before viewing France's second biggest box office hit of all time. Mr. Weinstein will be bringing The Intouchables--which is about a rich quadriplegic and his black caretaker from the projects--over to America on May 25th.

But if this wasn't an after-party, what were we to make of publicist Peggy Siegal running around, directing interns with heavy chairs through throngs of people so that Mr. Weinsteins family could all sit down? Oh, apparently she was just a "good friend of Harvey's."

So was French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who didn't make it to the "not after-party" party, but sent a note on behalf of his country. Mr. Weinstein later informed the crowd that President Sarkozy was his youngest child's godfather.
Now that the Weinstein Brothers are back on top, we certainly didn't want to cause any trouble, unlike the infamous story of the former New York Observer staffer who ended up being escorted out of a party in a headlock by the enraged bear responsible for Pulp Fiction's distribution.

"If we tell you about the tattoo, do you promise not to put us in a headlock and drag us out of here?" We asked a considerably fairer-weather Mr. Weinstein.

"Of course not! I love Jared Kushner!" The industry titan roared. We didn't feel that much safer, as our publisher did not happen to be standing in the room with us at the moment.

Still, it was a good night to be Harvey Weinstein, and he let us off the hook easy. Champagne bottles were uncorked, strange fish plates were passed around, and half of the Weinstein Company joined the esteemed ranks of Glenn Ford, Bono, and David Cronenberg as a recipient of France's highest honor.

The President and First Lady, discussing the plot of 'Never Let Me Go' (Getty Images)

No Shame in her game! Academy Award-nominated gamine Carey Mulligan attended last night's State Dinner in honor of her Prime Minister, David Cameron--but as a plus-one (perhaps the President didn't care for the Wall Street sequel, and believes money does sometimes sleep?). She attended with her boyfriend Marcus Mumford, whose band Mumford and Sons performed. Hopefully her brush with power was an education for Ms. Mulligan.

Other boldfacers reportedly in attendance: Anna Wintour, who brought Shelby Bryan; John Legend, who brought model Chrissy Teigen (didn't she used to be Christine); Harvey Weinstein, who brought Georgina Chapman (whose Marchesa designed Michelle Obama's gown); and George Clooney, who did not bring Stacey Keibler. Hey, awards season is over!

Kelly Ripa and Anderson Cooper co-hosted last night's screening of "Bully" with the Weinstein Company, the Cinema Society and Bing.

Celebs from Russell Simmons (in trademark Yankees cap, clutching a plastic bottle filled with healthful-looking green juice), Michelle Trachtenberg, and Carson Kressley to David LaChapelle, Andre Leon Talley and Rachel Roy turned out in droves for a Crosby Street Hotel screening of the hotly anticipated Lee Hirsch-directed documentary "Bully."

Hosted by The Weinstein Company and Bing with Anderson Cooper and Kelly Ripa, the screening left a powerful impression on many in the all-star audience. Sitting in the safe space of a boutique hotel's screening room, dressed to the nines while watching kids in the heartland suffer for the very uniqueness that might make them popular in a place like New York, was a bit jarring.

The film follows five families in Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Iowa -- three with children who have been victimized by persistent bullying, and two who have lost children to suicide. (The 110-minute film opens with heartbreaking footage of one of the teen suicides as a baby, establishing an emotional intensity that never eases.)

In remarks to the audience, which also included Caroline Murphy, Heather Matarazzo, Gossip Girl's Kaylee DeFer, Teen Vogue's Andrew Bevan, Harvey Weinstein, and Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir, Cooper warned, "Bullying today is not like when I was a kid. It used to be that it only happened in schools. The home was a respite."

"Now, because of social media, kids are bullied around the clock."

Cooper underscored one of the film's main themes, the infuriatingly inadequate response of overwhelmed school officials like Kim Lockwood, assistant principal of East Middle School in Sioux City, Iowa, where much of the film takes place. (In one grim scene, Lockwood -- who comes to personify being part of the problem if you're not part of the solution -- relentlessly badgers a bullying victim for his reluctance to accept his tormentor’s obviously forced apology: "You're just like him!" The distraught youth has the clarity to retort, through clenched teeth: "I don't hurt people.")

Kelly Ripa's involvement with the film began when Cooper invited her to a town hall meeting at Rutgers after the suicide of Tyler Clementi. Like Cooper, she blames social media for intensifying the bullying plague: "It's TV, it's iChat, it's Twitter," Ripa told Velvet Roper. "Kids don't need to be tweeting... they don't need phones, computers. Computers should be for homework and that's it!" Ripa's own children, age 9, 10 and 14, are well protected -- in theory: "We only have one computer in the house, and it's great -- it's in the kitchen! They resent us for it, but I don't care," Ripa laughed.

The marketing of "Bully" resembles an advocacy campaign more than a Hollywood rollout. The documentary's naturalistic profanity earned an R rating from the MPAA -- "which we totally think sucks," lamented director Hirsch -- preventing it from being screened in the schools where the filmmakers think it is most urgently needed. (A petition to change the rating to PG-13, launched by a Michigan teen, has drawn nearly 300,000 signatures at Change.org.)

Hirsch, who was bullied as a youth, draws no line between his artistry and his activism. (The Oklahoma father of an 11-year-old suicide victim is shown campaigning against bulling on Facebook, and organizing a series of "Stand For The Silent" rallies that bring together several of the families.) "We have a real opportunity with this movie to change hearts and minds," Hirsch told the crowd. "Schools may have programs, but if there's a culture that says we're not going to deal with it, that athletics and buildings are more important..."

Peter Feld is editor of Scooter, The Observer's parenting magazine.