Take that, Pink's *

How Only in L.A. is this? It's 4 a.m., you're nursing a cup of Joe at Astro Burger on Santa Monica Boulevard. In blasts a faintly familiar babe who looks like she could kick your ass—wearing a gazillion-dollar dress cut down to her ass. She beams at everyone, sits with her posse and puts her gold statue on the table. This week's People has photos of Hilary Swank wolfing down a veggie cheeseburger with root beer on her way home from the Oscar parties. Now Astro Burger is a star. From the New York Post:

Still dressed in her stunning backless gown, the sexy superstar zoomed off to Astro Burger in West Hollywood last night after partying at the Governors Ball and the Vanity Fair shindig. She ordered a vegetarian cheeseburger and fries.

"She walked in with a big smile, raised the statue over her head and everybody burst into applause," owner Dino Andrianos told The Post. "It was a thrilling moment for everyone."

The brown-eyed brunette, accompanied by actor-hubby Chad Lowe and a couple of pals, then grabbed a table and plopped the gold statue down next to her tray.

Photo credit: Mark Dawursk. * Beat me to it: Defamer has a pic of the burger eating in progress.

Final Oscar peg: In the New York Observer, Bruce Feirstein uses the Academy Awards to take off on a riff more generally about the state of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has always been a city living on the precipice: mudslides, earthquakes, canyon fires; an undermanned and poorly funded police force whose culture of resentment frightens the poor and the rich indiscriminately. It is a city that placed a bet on the 1984 Olympics—spending on stadiums and sports facilities, as opposed to schools and services—and reaped, as its reward, civic riots within a decade. Note to the five boroughs: Today, all that’s left is a legacy of crumbling cement benches with Olympic logos on the side.

In the week leading up to the Oscars, Los Angeles suffered the worst rainstorms in its recorded history, since 1883.

It wasn’t just wet out here. It was torrential, biblical, mudslide-hail-and-thunderbolt "Get in the limos, boys, we’re headin’ out to the ark" wet. Massive homes toppled into the canyons; freeways became impassable rivers; sinkholes swallowed traffic intersections.

And as Oscar-bound New Yorkers flew over the San Gabriel mountains into LAX—leaving Christo’s Gates far behind—they were greeted by a vast patchwork of buildings, homes, factories and schools, wrapped in bright blue plastic. Call it Survival Art, or the art of survival; the provenance wasn’t Christo, but Home Depot. And the workers who did the installation came not from France, but from Mexico, for American cash.

Yeah yeah, don't write me: I know they weren't the worst storms in L.A. history. He probably does too. ("Worst" is relative anyway, now that the region's flooding problems are mostly in the past.)