Sacha Baron Cohen’s pre-show bit of pouring the ostensible ashes of Kim Jong Il on Ryan Seacrest was so daring! So rock ‘n’ roll! So hilariously calculated and self-promoting for his new movie “The Dictator”! And yet, the event Jezebel helpfully dubbed “the ashing” would prove the first surprise of the evening — and the moment of “Seacrest dumping” America’s waited a good 10 years for.

Billy Crystal, in the predictable opening mashup of nominated films, segued from appearing as a time-traveling, Hitler-killing “Midnight in Paris” blackfaced Sammy Davis Jr. straight into the poop pie scene from “The Help.” Perhaps we haven’t yet cured that whole racial sensitivity thing, America.

A tearful, visibly overcome Octavia Spencer, who got a standing ovation and thanked the entire state of Alabama, still had to end her emotional acceptance speech with “Please wrap up? I’m wrapping up. I’m sorry, I’m freaking out.” At least nobody tried to crowd her offstage to make way for Blur.

A pretaped bit imaging a 1939 focus group for “The Wizard of Oz” was a Christopher Guest alumni reunion, featuring Guest and his repertory veterans Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban and Jennifer Coolidge. A powerful reminder that it’s been way too long since the guys who sent up the Oscars in “For Your Consideration” made a movie together – and that everybody loves flying monkeys.

In one of the night’s few political moments, “A Separation” writer and director Asghar Farhad accepted his win for best foreign film by saying, “At a time of talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their county, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.” The moment was only undercut a little by Steven Spielberg’s pinched O RLY? face.

Cirque du Soleil – which just happened to also advertise during the broadcast – paid homage to the golden age of movies in its uniquely limber, vaguely unsettling way. It was dramatic, for sure, with performers swaying over the audience in trapezes and cavorting about like human slingshots. But we’re not convinced that the best way to “We love cinema” is a lady who can touch the back of her head with her foot.

Former host Chris Rock, so scathing and so on the money, noted that in animation, “If you’re a white man you can play an Arabian prince. And if you’re a black man you can play a donkey or a zebra.” Rock, who made an excellent zebra in “Madagascar,” then went on to demonstrate how much “hard work” it takes to be a voice actor in Hollywood. “And then I go, ‘It’s time to go to the store!’ And then they give me a million dollars.” Line of the night.

Flashing a formidable portion of her endless leg, presenter Angelina Jolie – who just a few weeks ago won wows for her Golden Globe look, stumbled over her words and quickly lit up the Twitterverse with comments about how gaunt she appeared. Maybe the actress is looking a bit underfed these days, but all the remarks about how she needs to eat a sandwich seemed remarkably tone deaf in an evening when the show’s writers were dishing out a bevy of fat jokes. Body snarking – still gross when you do it to thin people! On the upside, however, the whole episode did spawn the instantly awesome Twitter account for Angelina Jolie’s Leg.

The cast of “Bridesmaids,” presenting for the short subjects and not so coyly turning it into an opportunity for jokes about how heft, length and size matter, provided a little much needed raunch in a deeply unsubversive evening. Even better than the penis jokes, however, was Melissa McCarthy and Rose Byrne whipping out their little airplane-size bottles to do shots at the utterance of the word “Scorsese.” Just like all of us at home.

Eternal nominee Meryl Streep admitted that she could hear half of America saying “Oh, no. Come on, why her… again?” when she pulled her upset over Viola Davis. But after adding a sassy, “But whatever,” she tearfully acknowledged her friends and her “inexplicably wonderful career” and confessed, “I really understand I’ll never be up here again.” It was a graceful moment of gratitude, one that almost made the evening worth staying up for. The movies, like Meryl, remain inexplicably wonderful. So why is celebrating them still such a crap shoot?

That may end up being the case years down the line. But judging from the available evidence, it’s not going to happen any time soon. Bigelow’s movie was released in 2009, but in 2011, only 5 percent of the top-grossing movies were directed by women. And, astoundingly, the Oscars are even worse. None — zero — of the films in the best picture, best director, best adapted or original screenplay, best lead or supporting actor, and best supporting actress categories were directed by women. In the major categories, 98 percent of nominations went to movies directed by men, 84 percent went to movies written by men, and 70 percent went to movies starring men. The only female-centered movies that appear outside the best actress categories are “The Help” and “Bridesmaids.” In the best picture category, there are as many movies about women as there are movies about horses.

Getting beyond basic cast-and-crew details, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist pop culture media critic and the editor of Feminist Frequency, has produced a video putting the 2012 best picture nominees to the so-called Bechdel test. This looks at whether a film has, at any point, female characters having an interaction with each other that’s not about a male character. Only two of the 10 pass. While it’s possible for male directors and writers to produce representative depictions of women (as Manohla Dargis said in a 2009 interview, “Flaubert wrote ‘Madame Bovary.’ That’s all we need to say about that”), they mostly don’t. Female characters aren’t given anything to do besides pine about their (heterosexual) romantic interests.

Besides Bigelow, only three other women have been nominated for the best director Oscar: Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation” in 2003, Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993, and Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” in 1976. In the years since Bigelow’s win, no women have been nominated. “Women in Hollywood are still largely excluded from prominent decision making and production roles,” Sarkeesian wrote in an email. “Bigelow’s win is definitely something to celebrate, but I don’t think it reflects on any substantial shift within the film industry as a whole.”

“Hollywood is very big on symbolism and mistaking symbolic breakthroughs for actual breakthroughs,” Richard Rushfield, a veteran entertainment journalist who blogs at rushfieldbabylon.com, wrote me. “And then once they’ve had the symbolic breakthroughs and pat themselves on the back for a job well done, they forget to do the job.”

Nor were the 2010 Oscars an unalloyed triumph for feminism. As Rebecca Clark Mane, a feminist cultural critic from the University of Washington, pointed out, the dual wins for Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side” and Mo’Nique in “Precious” sent a troubling message. “They managed to both celebrate regressive gender politics which locate women’s primary role as mothers while at the same time setting the ‘bad’ black mother against the ‘good’ white mother,” she wrote.

“Bridesmaids” has already had a positive effect on the fortunes of some women in the industry; “Who Invited Her?,” a comedy by Sascha Rothschild about a woman invited along on a bachelor party weekend, was quickly picked up after “Bridesmaids’” big numbers came out. But it’s troubling that the job prospects of an entire gender seem dependent on what’s likely to be a comedy fad, and it’s telling that every action movie of note released since “The Hurt Locker” has been directed by a man.

The source of women’s underrepresentation at the Oscars is not exactly a mystery. A recent study by the L.A. Times confirmed what we all pretty much suspected: The Academy is overwhelmingly white and male. Seventy-seven percent of Oscar voters are male, a population that is very much at odds with America but fairly representative of the people who make the decisions in Hollywood.

Hollywood’s sexism is so obvious that it’s become almost hard to get worked up about. But these numbers should be incredibly troubling. Few industries that aren’t explicitly men-only, like professional sports, are allowed to display such drastic gender bias. Hollywood movies are funded by men, made by men — and, usually, made for men, especially young men.

Awareness of that audience makes the Academy’s embrace of even the two female-centric movies problematic. While the commercial success of “Bridesmaids” is heartening, its Oscar nominations came only in the writing and supporting actress categories, not the prestige picture/director awards. And it’s notable that only a female comedy that was repeatedly, and pointedly, presented as a male “raunch comedy” with female leads could receive recognition. It’s like the supposedly anachronistic plot of another nominee, “Albert Nobbs“: Women can only succeed by acting like men. It’s not that “Bridesmaids” isn’t a great film that deserves a billion awards. It’s just that, standing up there by itself, you start to get suspicious why that film was singled out. It’s like Carrie suddenly getting picked as homecoming queen. Reasonable observers begin to suspect there’s an ulterior motive at work.

There’s a similar problem with “The Help” being the only female-centric best picture nominee. Its problems with race have been widely discussed (and, indeed, Sarkeesian does in her video). But its representation of women in general is problematic, too. In the best picture category, male leads get to be actors, landowners, adventurers, inventors, writers, executives, soldiers and architects. Female leads get to be … housewives or domestic servants. (Even the supporting female characters are largely wives and mothers.) It’s not that this doesn’t represent an aspect of women’s experiences. It’s just that it doesn’t represent anything close to the entirety of women’s experiences, and the recognition of a film that emphasizes gender stereotypes and not a movie that gives another kind of portrait (like “Young Adult,” say) is telling.

How to fix this? The industry isn’t going to deal with the problem by itself, or it would’ve done so already. It’s even in its self-interest to cater to female audiences (movies like “Twilight” show how much potential is there), but Hollywood still can’t manage to get its act together. Nor is the nature of the entertainment business holding movie executives back from employing more women. Television, while far from parity, at least offers better opportunities for female creators, from Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” and Jenji Kohan’s “Weeds” to all the female showrunners now working and the older actresses that have found a home on the small screen when the movies turned their back.

Maybe we need some affirmative action for Hollywood. If the government thinks it’s important to set standards for equality in workplace hiring, sports and college admissions, it might be time to recognize the importance of movies’ cultural and economic power. Hollywood is, after all, a multibillion-dollar industry, and one of America’s biggest exports. For women to have so few opportunities in the upper ranks of such an important industry is absurd, and exactly the kind of thing the government would want to get involved in — theoretically, anyway. In reality, of course, Hollywood has ingratiated itself so thoroughly with elected officials that it’s highly unlikely any such action will get taken soon.

Writing about these sorts of issues can sometimes be hard, especially when it comes to private organizations like movie studios. Unlike the government, Paramount Pictures never agreed to fairly represent their audience, and have the right to pursue profit however they please, even if it would be more profitable not to ignore half of your potential audience. And if Terrence Malick wants to make a movie so man-focused that it could fairly be retitled “Father Issues Across the Ages,” he should go right ahead, especially if it’s going to turn out as wonderfully as “Tree of Life” did. But award shows are dedicated to recognizing a large number of quality films regardless of commercial interest, and are decided by a small, defined elite. Though they are also, of course, four-hour smugfests of meaningless, self-congratulatory drivel, they offer an opportunity for a cultural industry to show what it values. And if the Oscars are anything to judge by, then Hollywood doesn’t value women very highly at all.

It is nearly impossible not to recall McDaniel in light of the success of “The Help.” Indeed, the pairing of Davis and Spencer evokes the similar pairing of McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, whose comic turn as Prissy in “Gone With the Wind” was equally deserving of a nomination in 1939.  And indeed, McDaniel and McQueen faced those same criticisms about the roles they took, as did their industry contemporary Lincoln Perry (aka Stepin Fetchit) and Bert Williams, whose success came in the early part of the 20th century. Though Perry and Williams are now celebrated for their comic genius, such latitude has rarely  been given to black actresses like McDaniel, Spencer or recent nominees such as Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique (who won for best supporting actress in 2010), who are criticized in some black circles as much for the roles they portray as they are for their body types, which seem to conjure, in the minds of many, the worst stereotypes of black domestics and so-called welfare queens.

Given the realities of racist imagery that continues to circulate in American society, whether as thoughtless tweets about professional basketball player Jeremy Lin or cartoons that compare the first black president to apes, it is not surprising that there is a desire among some blacks to police representations. This is old and dirty business, which led McDaniels in her day to make her oft-cited claim that she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one in real life; the kind of business that led the Hollywood Branch of the NAACP to establish the Image Awards in the late 1960s to more directly regulate the production and reproduction of blackness. Of course, the organization never fails to find itself in the quandary of having to mute its own proclivity to criticize black images that don’t adhere to some sanitized and respectable notion of how “Colored People” are supposed to look and act, especially when those images are produced by blacks themselves (see Tyler Perry) or if some of those “Colored People” are up for Academy Awards, as was the case 27 years ago when they shifted their criticism of “The Color Purple.” “The Help,” by the way, won several awards at the recent NAACP Image Awards.

For far too many people invested in the gatekeeping of all things black, Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” is really a “Dream of Sidney,” the dashing, cinematically daring, Afro-Caribbean man, who in the late 1950s not only exemplified the best of his profession (regardless of race), but became the template for the right way to act and be black on-screen.  Poitier, of course, continually wrestled with his characters, trying not to be some cardboard cutout of the naturally integrated and un-offensive black man (an image that our current president often chooses not to wrestle with), as witnessed by the roles he took on that we don’t so much celebrate: “The Lost Man” (1969), where he portrays an Army veteran turned radical; “The Organization” (1971), the third in his trilogy of Virgil Tibbs films that began with “In the Heat of the Night” (1967); or as post-civil rights gangster Manny Durrell in “A Piece of the Action” (1978), opposite Bill Cosby.

Ultimately for many black artists the “politics of respectability” is simply tiring and defeating; Poiter’s retreat from acting in the late 1970s was as much about the lack of quality scripts as it was a rejection of having to always represent the race. It was the same trap faced by Poiter’s once and future heir-apparent Denzel Washington. With seminal black heroic figures such as Steven Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter and high school football coach Herman Boone in his rearview, Washington has sought to play less than respectable characters in his movies.  When pressed about those choices and his responsibilities after the release of “American Gangster,” in which he portrayed legendary Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, he told Men’s Vogue, ”It’s not about the black experience. It’s more specific and selfish than that. It’s what I feel like doing, not what I feel like people need.”  Though some have griped about Washington’s late career choices — including Smiley — he is allowed to be seen simply as a black artist, who brings depth to whatever role he plays.

Such courtesies are rarely extended to black actresses, who as an extension of the roles that black women often play in black communities, are expected to carry the “blood-stained banner” for the uplift of the race, even at the expense of their artistry.  This was the point that Davis made as she responded to Smiley’s concerns with the assertion that such critiques are “absolutely destroying the black artist. The black artist cannot live in a place – in a revisionist place – the black artist can only tell the truth about humanity and humanity is messy, people are messy.”

Yet, I can’t help thinking what Hattie McDaniel, who died in 1952, would say about all of this. I imagine that McDaniel might be surprised at the number of black women who have been honored since 1939, and perhaps would take great pride in the ability of Davis and Spencer to elevate the humanity of those women who actually work as domestics — as McDaniel did many years ago.  I imagine she’d be surprised by all the attention surrounding the portrayal of black women domestics of the 1960s, sensing a freedom to speak back — a spirit of resistance, that she couldn’t experience on- or off-screen in 1939. Finally, I imagine she’d just be happy that Davis and Spencer are allowed to celebrate their accomplishments among their White peers, unlike McDaniel and her escort, who were forced to sit alone because of segregated seating arrangements.

It’s all relative and it’s about time we trust black artists to make choices for the sake of their art and not tired ideals about how “negro-folk” are supposed to act.

When I encountered Pitt at a press conference, he was dressed positively to the nines, in an outfit that seemed to radiate quotation marks: white silk T-shirt under white linen jacket, enormous gold-frame sunglasses, piles of gold chains, a delicious tan and four days’ worth of carefully groomed stubble. But instead of the monosyllabic, Bob Dylan-style too-cool-for-school attitude you might expect to go along with that, Pitt was unfailingly polite and forthcoming, at least as far as the nutso surroundings would permit. He answered questions about his religious beliefs (slim to none); his family life both growing up in small-town Missouri and today, as a globetrotting and immensely famous dad; his relationships with his own father and own children, and almost anything else people came up with.

Anyone who becomes famous enough that strangers want to take his or her picture has to manage a version of this performance, of course, but it struck me for the first time that Pitt’s performance was a thoughtful and generous one. He gave the photographers and the onlookers packed onto the sidewalks exactly what they came for, Eva Peron-style: a vision of improbable, unattainable beauty, glamour and luxury. And he gave those of us in the press room, and our readers all over the world, what we came for too: the illusion of intimacy, the impression that one of the most famous people in the world was opening up to us in unprecedented fashion, the suggestion that despite the evidence to the contrary all around us, this god among men was in fact an ordinary human being who could talk straightforwardly about others.

It was like that moment, every single night in Las Vegas, when Wayne Newton mops his brow and announces that just this one time, because the audience has been so amazing, he and the band are gonna cut loose and play a little longer. Even if we all know it’s a charade — and it’s debatable whether we all know that — Wayne is going to play a little longer, and does seem to be having a good time, and we’re all delighted about that. Brad Pitt was being the Wayne Newton of Cannes, simultaneously playing a larger-than-life Mr. Showbiz cartoon character endowed with an unholy combination of genetics, luck and talent, and also giving us little flashes of what may be the real person behind the mask.

Pitt is unlikely to win an Academy Award this year — technically, he’s up for two, as both the leading man and producer of “Moneyball,” a best-picture nominee — but 2011 looks like a turning point in his career. At various times and in various pictures over the years, he’s certainly reminded us that he’s capable of real acting. You may have your own favorites, but I’d put forward “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Fight Club,” “Se7en,” “Interview With the Vampire” and “Johnny Suede,” his first starring role. (A mixed bag of movies, to be sure, but Pitt’s memorable in all of them.) But there’s also been a lot of genial, pretty-boy coasting in sub-mediocre movies during Pitt’s two decades as a star, from “Meet Joe Black” and “Seven Years in Tibet” to “Troy” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the film during which he first met a certain long-legged brunette whom he may yet turn, one of these days, into an honest woman.

It’s precisely that dull-witted mid-career period that Pitt seemed to describe in a recent interview, alluding both to his admitted affinity for marijuana and his marriage to Jennifer Aniston: “I spent the ’90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself.”

At the risk of engaging in bogus long-distance celebrity therapy, it seems clear that Angelina Jolie has focused much less attention on her acting career since hooking up with Pitt, whereas the effect on him has been almost the opposite. Since appearing with Jolie in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” seven years ago, Pitt has entirely avoided the kind of slick, studio-packaged entertainments that once defined him, with the solitary exception of “Ocean’s Thirteen,” which he may have been contractually obligated to do, and in any case was harmless fun. Instead, he has worked with Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel”), the Coen brothers (“Burn After Reading”), David Fincher (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), Quentin Tarantino (“Inglourious Basterds”) and Malick, along with playing Jesse James in a 160-minute epic and personally taking over production of “Moneyball” to rescue it from Hollywood limbo.

I’m not sure any of those movies represent their directors’ finest hours, honestly. But it’s an impressive range of filmmakers, works and performances, from the amped-up shtick of playing Chad Feldheimer in “Burn After Reading” and Lt. Aldo Raine in “Inglourious Basterds” to the big dramatic roles as Benjamin Button and Billy Beane that garnered Pitt’s first two best-actor nominations. (I had totally forgotten that he got a supporting nomination for “Twelve Monkeys” in 1995.) And Pitt shows no signs of ramping down this new and more ambitious trajectory. He recently finished shooting both “Cogan’s Trade,” a mob thriller with a crackerjack cast from “Jesse James” director Andrew Dominik, and “World War Z,” Marc Forster’s long-awaited zombiepocalypse epic. He’s been cast alongside Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Shame” director Steve McQueen’s forthcoming “Twelve Years a Slave,” and apparently serves as narrator for Malick’s next film, “Voyage of Time,” which has been described as a history of the universe. (I thought that’s what “Tree of Life” was, but there’s no point in asking such questions.)

As for Pitt’s performance in “Moneyball,” it’s terrific, but it also isn’t the real story. On-screen in almost every scene, he fills up the movie with gum-chewing ex-jock swagger and bluff animal shrewdness, playing a guy who wasn’t quite smart enough to grasp the statistical revolution in baseball all by himself, but was smart enough to understand that it offered his only path to survival. Pitt may have found his own moneyball formula, partly reflecting his devotion to an unorthodox family life and his realization that, at age 48, his time as sexiest man on the planet is almost up. The lucky bastard isn’t just gorgeous and rich, he’s also ambitious, talented and just smart enough to make it interesting. Will he turn himself into an Oscar winner, one of these years? I have no idea, and don’t really care. But his performance as Brad Pitt, from here on out, is going to be fun to watch.