The Ugly Truth About The World's Most Famous Film Festival:

I'm about to go to a party hosted by Boujis nightclub, where, I've been promised, not only Harrison Ford will be holding court, but also Gael Garcia Bernal, Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.

As I'm sitting watching all these rich, successful, famous, rich (did I already say that?) people waft past, I am thinking: this is probably the most glamorous place in the world to be right now. Scrub that. This is the only place to be.

But what I should have known is that the more lavish the occasion, the more exclusive the invite, the more velvet ropes you have to duck under, the more tall, inscrutable men with walkie-talkies you have to inveigle your way past - the more putrid the reality that lies beneath.

Let me give you an example, courtesy of my movie producer dinner date (who is constantly looking over my shoulder in case someone more interesting hovers into view; a common behavioural tic in Cannes), that illustrates how dissatisfied all this hobnobbing can make you.

'You can't just go to a party on the beach,' he says, drawing on a cigarette (people here don't give much truck to the smoking ban, or to rules about any illegal substances). 'You have to go to a party on a yacht. But it has to be a private party, and it can't be on anything smaller than an 85ft yacht.'

And what happens on these yacht parties at Cannes? Well, according to Liz Jones of the Daily Mail, extremely rich old men do large quantities of drugs, watch porn flicks and take their pick from a herd of 18-year-old models. Producers and other folks looking for funding sources do drugs with the old financiers so that they will trust them. Then they pitch movie ideas that either make these bigwigs feel guilty or turn them on. Everyone is more famous and more wealthy than everyone else and it's a dog eat dog, sleep with dog's carcass kind of world. If you wanted to know what goes down behind the velvet rope, who is sleeping with who and just how ridiculous the glitterati actually is, it's all there in print.