In the interest of gaining closure on one of the more absurd Oscar storylines we’d been tracking, and assuming (hoping, really?) that you didn’t make the mistake of tuning in to the red carpet coverage to watch Ryan Seacrest psychically discern the designer of every starlet’s dress (with near 100% accuracy!), we note that Sacha Baron Cohen did, in fact, show up in full Wadiyan strongman regalia and earn the free publicity for The Dictator he and Paramount so doggedly sought. Congratulations? And so the “story” ended, with Seacrest brushing “Kim Jong-il’s cremains” from his tuxedo as Cohen was hustled off by “security,” and all of us left with (perhaps) a smirk of fleeting “amusement,” but moreover the feeling that “Admiral General Aladeen” should have gone a lot bigger after all this fuss, perhaps by striking his interlocutor in the head with a scepter, rolling the host’s unconscious body up in a rug, and taking Seacrest back to his “harem.” (I.e., locking him in a storage closet with Borat’s neon green banana-sling and some of Bruno’s human coffee tables.) But I suppose we all get the publicity stunt we deserve, not the one we want.