Reporter Stacy Lambe captured this terrific moment from the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala, in which Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence jumps into the frame of cameras taking pictures of Sarah Jessica Parker, who, in keeping with the event’s punk theme, wore a daring, mohawked Philip Treacy headpiece to the Ball. Marion Cotillard is caught in the .Gif laughing, and we laughed with her. It’s the perfect distillation of why Jennifer Lawrence has become a Hollywood sweetheart—and why so much contempt is heaped on actresses like Anne Hathaway and Gwyneth Paltrow:

What’s striking about Lawrence in this image is the gap between her decorum and her self-presentation. She’s being goofy, and to an extent, she’s even making fun of one of her fellow attendees at the Met Ball. She’s displaying an awareness that there’s more than one way to win the Met Ball, and more than one set of observers watching the event. While Parker is posing for the credentialed photographers on the red carpet, Lawrence is disrupting their shots and mugging for us. It’s a savvy act of complicity, an acknowledgement that the event is ridiculous.

But it’s also one that lets Lawrence have it both ways. She’s at the Met Ball, after all, rather than staying home because she’s rather be doing something else, or out of active protest at the dog and pony show. Not only did Lawrence attend, she did so in a Christian Dior dress and a birdcage veil that wasn’t exactly in keeping with the evening’s punk theme. Maybe it’s less conformist for Lawrence to rock Hollywood glamour than to hew to the directions she was given for the night, but it’s not as if she was taking any risks to her image by rocking a ball gown, either. But unlike Anne Hathaway, who puts on a prim-and-proper demeanor to match her Prada (nice girls wear it as well as the Devil), Lawrence is careful to obscure the extent to which she cares what anyone thinks of her in a layer of quotations about going to see New York theater phenomenon Sleep No More and going to Walmart.

Ultimately, Lawrence is playing out an old game in a new medium. She’s a screwball heroine come to life, a woman whose behavior breaks the codes of her class and gender without ever becoming genuinely challenging or disconcerting. Sometimes that characters is annoying, a la Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. And sometimes she’s incisive and cutting, like Barbara Stanwyck’s con woman in The Lady Eve, who, in a famous speech about high-status women who are falling all over themselves to be introduced to her mark, a brewery heir played by Henry Fonda, is effectively serving up the same critique of women who play by the rules that Lawrence’s photobomb did:

These figures aren’t unimportant, and their behavior and their observations can stretch the limits of acceptable female behavior. But the extent to which they play by the rules is just as important as the small ways in which they break them. Stanwyck employs the same tools that the women she makes fun of do to land the exact same man—she’s just better at it, and in her slinky, solar-plexus-baring dress, sexier than the handkerchief-dropping battleaxes who are her competition. Hepburn may be a goofball, but she’s still a rich girl who ends up resolving her romantic quandaries via philanthropy. And it’s possible to appreciate Jennifer Lawrence the same way. Whether she’s performing or not, her performance at the Met Ball and elsewhere is a lot of fun. But that doesn’t make her a genuine rebel against Hollywood norms. And as long as we don’t mistake a screwball performance for a revolution, we might as well enjoy Lawrence for what she is.

I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.