As the cocktail hour progressed at Cipriani on Tuesday night, all eyes scanned the room for the man of honor: Tom Cruise. But the actor, who was being fêted by the Museum of the Moving Image for his three-decade career in cinema, was nowhere to be found. Taking up the slack was Katie Holmes. Wearing a halter-neck black velvet Hermès gown, the second-syllable part of the phenomenon internationally known as TomKat showed no signs of fatigue from the New York marathon she had run a couple of days earlier. "Oh, that little thing?" she joked. "Yeah, that was intense. But it felt amazing."

Cruise himself was on hand for the evening's second act, wherein a handful of Hollywood heavyweights offered their praises and anecdotes to the sold-out crowd and introduced a greatest-hits montage of the star's career. Julianne Moore did the honors for a Magnolia clip, director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer handled Far and Away and A Few Good Men, Oliver Stone talked about Born on the Fourth of July, Ellen Barkin took the duties for The Color of Money, and Kenneth Branagh analyzed the cinematic merits of Cruise's karaoke moment in Top Gun as well as his trouser-less dance moves in Risky Business.

As the worlds of New York society and Tinseltown converged (Marjorie Gubelmann, Coralie Charriol Paul, and Dr. Lisa Airan meet Leelee Sobieski, Susan Sarandon, and Leven Ramblin), the attention remained on Cruise. Throughout dinner he was on his feet to greet friends and meet fans, prompting more than one well-heeled guest to produce a digital camera from her clutch. "He probably hasn't had a bite to eat tonight," Amy Sacco, who knows a thing or two about celebrity mores, said. "But that's the way he likes it. He'd rather talk to his fans than gnaw on the asparagus." Guess that's one way to stay in shape for your next screen role.

— Derek Blasberg