Almost everything about the 90th Academy Awards had an overt political charge. Was it the start of something real? I tried to find out (after shuffling in behind Steven Spielberg)

There are no instructions for taking a Lyft to the Oscars. They send you a whole pamphlet about where to park your limousine, but nothing that just tells a person, like, where the door is, in case a person happens to be trundling up on foot after hopping out of a Hyundai Elantra six blocks away. A person like me, for instance. Or, maybe, Laura Dern! (Or me.)

“Ma’am! Ma’am! You can’t go that way!” a policeman shouted as my husband and I were wandering around looking for the door like impressive Hollywood insiders. “Oh, sorry!” I called as he pointed us toward the correct gap in the chain-link fence. “We’re between limousines right now.”

One cool thing about the Oscars is that the authority figures get progressively nicer to you the more checkpoints you successfully pass through. At the first checkpoint, a cop yells at you (see above), but by the 18th or so a professional tennis player in a tuxedo hands you a gin and tonic and tells you you look amazing. It’s like experiencing evolution in graspable time – becoming human step by step.

We shuffled through the metal detectors behind Steven Spielberg, who was anxious because he couldn’t find his tickets (he got in somehow), and emerged on to the red carpet. You can’t tell on TV, but the red carpet is a kind of tube filled with screaming. Celebrities walk down a carpeted 35-metre stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, beneath a plastic canopy and flanked by bleachers. The bleachers are peopled with celebrity enthusiasts who scream and scream the celebrities’ names, trying to get the celebrities to look at them, or even wave. Those who have tickets but are not celebrities, like me, shuffle in a throng between the celebrities and the bleachers, absorbing the screams like living acoustic tiles. The mayhem is potent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saoirse Ronan and her mother Monica greet Frances McDormand. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Our seats for the ceremony were in the third row of the second balcony. From our perch, we could see the first few rows of A-listers down near the stage: Greta Gerwig fist-bumping Timothée Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan leaping on Frances McDormand, Nicole Kidman just walking around in physical space like that’s normal.

I’d heard speculation that the Academy might try to tamp down the #MeToo and #TimesUp speechifying, but if they made such an attempt, it was a catastrophic failure. This year’s Oscars went in hard – to the point that it’s difficult to remember anything that didn’t have an overt political charge.

Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue could be credibly described as a feminist rant. “We can’t let bad behaviour slide any more,” Kimmel said. “The world is watching us. We need to set an example and the truth is if we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace; if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.”

Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayek – three of Harvey Weinstein’s most outspoken and high-profile accusers – presented a video calling for, as Judd put it, “equality, diversity, inclusion, intersectionality”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayek. Photograph: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Sciorra’s presence was especially affecting, as she (along with Mira Sorvino, who appeared in the video) was one of the lost ones, the uncounted women who claim their careers were destroyed by Weinstein (he denies the claims). And there she was, like a ghost returned, a physical embodiment of what is at stake.

Coco co-director Lee Unkrich issued a call for representation as well: “With Coco, we tried to take a step forward toward a world where all children can grow up seeing characters in movies that look and talk and live like they do. Marginalised people deserve to feel like they belong. Representation matters.”

Guillermo del Toro said: “The greatest thing our art does and our industry does is to erase the lines in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”

Common and Andra Day performed Stand Up for Something from Marshall in front of a group of activists that included Alice Brown Otter, Cecile Richards, Dolores Huerta, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Tarana Burke and Janet Mock. Rachel Shenton, the winner of the best live action short, delivered her speech in sign language.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lindy with her husband.

There is a danger, when activism and showbusiness merge, for a certain sense of the work to be lost – for justice and representation to become a product rather than a process. It’s exciting to see famous people on a massive stage say bold, unequivocal things about causes you’re passionate about, but it’s vital that the thrill of the performance doesn’t eclipse the immediate needs of the most vulnerable. I believe that representation is powerful, that representation gradually breeds profound change, but it’s a trapping of privilege to stop at representation alone – to sit back and wait for stubborn hearts and minds to remake themselves. People in peril now, hungry now, impoverished now, don’t have that luxury. Talk is not enough. Here’s hoping that Hollywood has plenty of action in it too. (The #TimesUp legal defence fund is a huge start.)

One notable call to action: in her best actress acceptance speech, McDormand called attention to the notion of an “inclusion rider” by which actors can demand diversity in cast and crew on any projects they take on.

“It’s a new day in Hollywood,” Jennifer Lawrence announced. I hope so.

There were some missteps, of course. Kimmel referring to Jordan Peele as “the kid from Comedy Central” was a full-body cringe. Kobe Bryant’s presence felt uncomfortable, even anachronistic, in a #MeToo world (Bryant was accused of rape in 2003. The charges were dropped and he later settled a civil claim). And the best actress montage, which featured clips of nominees from throughout the Oscars’ 90-year history, was so glaringly white that they featured Halle Berry twice. That was followed by this year’s best actress nominees, all of whom were white – a failure of intersectionality that the show itself had just primed us to notice.

Also, Get Out should have won.

Underneath each of our seats was a cardboard lunchbox filled with snacks, as well as a mysterious handwritten note about how much we deserved snacks: gummy bears, a granola bar, chocolate-covered Oreos and a clear plastic bag filled with potato chips. Small paper bags of the same potato chips had been on offer in the lobby before the show. It was truly the most generic-bulk-potato-chip-heavy luxury event I have ever attended. Each lunchbox was emblazoned with a different best picture nominee, so if you’ve always dreamed of owning a Darkest Hour commemorative cardboard lunchbox stained with potato grease, smash that eBay search!

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oscars freebie … a Get Out lunchbox

As we wandered through the Governors Ball, the opulent afterparty in the Dolby Ballroom, my husband suddenly barked a laugh that I knew meant: “A celebrity is doing something ridiculous.” I looked around and saw, just to our right, that celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck was waiting tables. I’m sure it was a stunt – he gallantly leaned over and offered something on a tray to Mahershala Ali – but there was something so absurdly, delightfully lavish about it.

The Oscars work so hard to feel like a dream: the dream of fame, of riches, of beauty, of recognition, of making great art. Wolfgang Puck waiting tables – that’s something that happens in a dream. Catherine Keener blew my husband a kiss. I saw Anjelica Huston with my own personal eyeballs. That can’t be real. But in the shadow of #MeToo and #TimesUp and #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite, this year’s Oscars felt like something more promising: a lucid dream.

If there is one thing the past seven months has taught us, it’s that our world is pliable. Our dreams are pliable. We don’t have to fill our dreams with thin, beautiful, straight, cis, white people just because those are the things our culture has conditioned us to value. Pile on the caveats – these Oscars were still pretty white, Hollywood is an imperfect messenger – but what I felt in that room on Sunday night was marginalised people tightening their grip and saying “enough”. We control this dream now; there’s no going back as long as we refuse.

I made one last, late-night stop, at the Vanity Fair afterparty, where I walked down a red carpet behind the cast of Black Panther doing a dance to a live a cappella group. I took a couple of laps and then left. What more do you need? This dream is better.