New York, April 19-24 – The Tribeca Film Festival is a week old, and downtown Manhattan is knee deep in celebrities. OK, that’s redundant. The celebrities are leaving their downtown homes and showing up to film screenings.

We talked to Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Great New Wonderful premiere, and she gave us the same political speech that everyone’s in a huff about, but really, we didn’t pay attention. In fact, we transcribed our interview and covered her entire speech with the sentence, “Maggie G. kind of babbled on way too long.” We had only scratched the surface of the truly important stuff - her top was Miu Miu and her skirt was Louis Vuitton - and then they dragged her away to pose for photos. Duly noted that neither of those designers is American.

We witnessed a couple of transformations; Parker Posey’s new look is grandma chic, and Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman plays a transsexual named Bree in Transamerica. Wait until they hear that on Wisteria Lane! Supermodel turned mom Claudia Schiffer was back in the Big Apple to cheer on filmmaker husband Matthew Vaughn’s latest, Layer Cake.

We wondered why rock goddess Sheryl Crow was at, like, every screening of the festival, until co-founder Jane Rosenthal mentioned that Crow is one of the festival judges. And no, we’re not clear on how she’s qualified as a film critic, but we love Sheryl, who schmoozed with her peers at Rosanna Arquette’s rockumentary, All We Are Saying.

Stay tuned; week two of the film fest is in progress.