And the nominees for Best Female Cinematographer and Best Female Sound Editor are …

Oh, wait. The Oscars don’t have those women-only categories. But then why does it compartmentalize the performers, into Best Actor and Actress, or Supporting Actor and Actress? Why not Jolie vs. Jenkins?

If good acting is good acting, should chromosomes play a role at all?

Yes, it might seem screwy to compare Angelina Jolie’s emotional “Changeling” performance to Richard Jenkins’s in “The Visitor.” But is it any more logical to judge Jenkins’ minimalist turn as a college professor against Brad Pitt’s wide-eyed romp through “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”?

So, has the academy ever considered knocking 15 minutes off its bloated program by lumping the acting awards into a gender neutral “Best Performer”?

“Not without chuckling,” says Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He says it would torque telecast viewers, who want more, not fewer, opportunities for celeb ogling. “It’s the appeal of movie stars,” Davis says. “Most of the suggestions that we get for new categories are for MORE acting awards.” He cites Best Juvenile Actor as a frequently nominated addition. On the other hand, “almost no one begs us to double the sound category.”

Scan through the sound editing nominees for this year, though, and it begins to seem that someone should. Though the category is technically gender neutral, each of the five nominated films lists all-male teams. All five of the Best Director nominees are men; so are all of the nominees listed for film editing, music scoring, adapted screenplay, cinematography and even makeup.

In fact, the only categories in which women have more nominees than men are Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress.

“It’s already so impossible for women to win anything,” says Debra Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit Women Make Movies. If the academy “got rid of Actress, they would win nothing at all.”

A 2008 study at the University of Southern California revealed it wasn’t just the awards that betray gender disparity, but the films themselves. The study evaluated nearly 7,000 speaking roles in recent Oscar-nominated movies, finding that only 27 percent of those roles belonged to women. In films with female directors, however, the percentage jumped to 44 percent.

The “women need better roles” complaint is way tired, but it hints at the best argument for gendered acting awards. Directors — along with screenwriters, composers, etc. — are in charge of their own vision. They decide who says what and to whom, and the motivation behind why it’s said. Actors, on the other hand, are vessels who carry out the vision.

“Very rarely are there roles where directors are just looking for an actor, regardless of the gender,” says Dodai Stewart, an editor for pop culture blog Jezebel.com. “If a man and a woman aren’t being considered for the same role, then why would they be considered for the same award?”