LAS VEGAS, Nev. — It’s billed as the porn Oscars, but the AVN Adult Movie Awards are a lot like a prom for the kids your mother always kept you clear of.

That makes Jesse Jane — primping in a 10th floor suite inside the Venetian Resort casino — perhaps the prom queen.

Pixie small, at 5-foot-3 with surgery-enhanced Barbie-like 34D-23-34 proportions, she’s one of the A-list studio “contract” porn stars who’ve recently made inroads into mainstream entertainment. If the adult film business has an “it girl” — a new generation to replace the old guard of Jenna Jameson who has announced she will no longer have sex on film — then Jesse is apparently it.

At 27, Jane has appeared on HBO’s popular Entourage, has a part in an upcoming Hollywood feature with Stephen Baldwin, bounced onto a Baywatch movie of the week and routinely makes it into the gossip section of newspapers and celebrity magazines.

It’s not the playground of Jodie Foster, but it’s a far cry further up the entertainment food chain than sex stars used to contend with.

This stretch into virgin territory — new frontiers of middle-America tolerance and growing market-share — is a hot topic among the major players in the business. Perhaps even more than the pressures of high definition movies which show every blemish, or the invasion of cheap and dirty point-of-view products shot on common-place video cameras and even more than the ongoing controversy in the industry over a lingering lack of responsible condom use.

“Cross over” is on everyone lips during this one recent weekend, which played host to the AVN porn awards. On this night, they’ll even give an award for it.

As one male porn star will explain: “We’re not just there for the raincoat crowd anymore.”

Even porn itself is testing general public morals by reaching further into pop culture. In Canada, the Movie Network runs blue movies after midnight, and other cable channels often throw their doors open to very adult content on Friday and Saturday nights. Porn has worked its way into reality TV, and celebrities — mostly rock stars — can often be seen with the likes of Jesse Jane on their arm. Though she’s now married to a fellow adult film star, the mother of one has been, in the past, gossip page-linked to Kid Rock and Motley Crue drummer, Tommy Lee.

“Mainstream is touching into the adult,” Jane reasons. “They’re a little bit more risque on cable, and finding out it’s not so bad.

“It’s fun to see them accept us now, and not just (be seen as) some bad porno (star).”

But even Jane believes there’s a limit to how far the inroads will take her and her open-minded peers.

Late on a Saturday afternoon, and Jane — who started out as a Texas military daughter — is cross-legged on a chair, as her blond locks are tossed about by a hairdresser. Make-up cases spill open on a table. The Digital Playground starlet is dressed in a revealing tank-top and shorts. She is not shy about using her sexuality for profit, or turning it off and on for a camera.

This is her business. Which explains why she had her breasts redone — because they weren’t apparently coming across just right in high definition.

It’s the same reason she’ll use tanning spray to cover marks left over from the birth of a son.

To her right, two male friends — one dressed in a housecoat — lounge and listen to music.

From between the drawn drapes, the bright lights of Las Vegas peek in on her.

“There will always be a division between mainstream and adult — no one is ever going to fully cross over,” she reasons. “There’s a stereotype that if you put a porn star in a mainstream TV show for a normal character, with a regular role, a lot of people aren’t even going to watch that.

“There’s always going to be that stigma.”

That’s one of the things she would warn her son about, she says, if, when he grows up, he wants to get into the business.

Shrugging, she adds: “But I don’t think the world should (cross over completely). I think the world needs both.

“Mainstream is for mainstream entertainment and adult is for adults.”

Earlier in the day, in a casino cafe, Digital Playground studio owner Samantha Lewis and her Canadian husband, Mark Kriski — arguably Los Angeles’ most popular TV weatherman — are ordering brunch, and chewing over the distance covered and the limits of porn’s crossover.

Samantha, a Texan who looks like she grew up in California, is likely the only major adult movie studio head who didn’t come out of the talent pool of the business. She’s a former real estate broker who, for years, taught Sunday school.

Nova Scotia-born Mark — who has a very Canadian birds-eye view of the business — says his wife runs a very conservative home, where the children are raised under strict guidelines.

On the wall of her studio office, you won’t find a picture from one of her big budget porn blockbusters, including Pirates (which she says the company sunk $2 million into) and the soon-to-be Pirates II. Instead, it’s a poster for Lord of the Rings.

“That’s my type of fantasy,” she admits.

In the past few years, she’s seen the business landscape change, to include more women in control of the business.

The Internet, she says, allowed curious women consumers to avoid a blacked-out strip-mall doorway into seedy XXX video stores.

“The business has changed entirely,” she contends.

“My wife could be running a company like IBM or Nike — it’s all a business,” Mark says, with the electronic chirps of slot machines filtering into the cafe.

Her holdings include an animation firm which deals with games.

The bridging into the mainstream is so pronounced, that an Asian buyer took her pornographic Pirates movie, cut the sex out of it, and rereleased it as a 76-minute G-rated family film.

“Most studios shoot the sex first, and the other scenes after — we shoot the sex last,” she explains.

That, she says, is the future — studios producing solid footage and images which can be then packaged to specific markets.

But there is a slight hesitation when she and her husband are asked whether they would like their children involved as future porn stars.

Very few people are suited for it, the studio head has decided. If they were able to cope, and were adults, they would have to respect the hardships, says Lewis.

“Someone like Jesse (Jane) can use her sexuality … has no problem with that, but many others cannot,” she says. “I couldn’t do it.”

Her movies are for adults, she points out, adding that’s why her company was the first major studio to include child locks on their DVDs.

“We’re creating a fantasy for adults, not children,” she says.

When they return home to California, there will be no mass sex parties at their home.

“I’ve got a copy of (the western) 3:10 To Yuma, so that’s what we’ll watch,” says Mark, who recalls a past Christmas party at a home of one of his news colleagues was more warped — including a transvestite Santa — than parties for his wife’s company.

Back up in her room, Jesse Jane bops around like an excited teenager — in part, at least, obviously playing to the camera following her.

Her voice and posture is sex kitten, but her eyes have a harder, knowing edge.

Her studio is now trying to find an agent to handle her non-sex roles — to help her further cross the distance into acceptability.

It’s something, no matter how wild they act out, most porn stars seem to dearly crave.

Before heading off to put on a dress which will place her on the red carpet of a porn awards prom, she asks why wouldn’t mainstream, entertainment hungry America accept her kind.

Pausing, she says: “We have talents.”