While editing my “John Carter” obituary a few weeks ago, I removed a large paragraph dealing with the trend of giving young white male filmmakers with barely a feature credit to their name the keys to $100 million-$300 million franchise films while seasoned pro women and/or minorities remain noticeably absent from the “wish list” (yes, I was glad to see F. Gary Gray on the Marvel wish-list for “Captain America 2″). And while I wouldn’t consider “The Hunger Games” a “female film,” it would be a great opportunity to make a point that female directors can indeed handle the kind of big-scale filmmaking that studios are all too willing to offer to mostly untested male directors as a matter of course. So, perhaps arbitrarily, perhaps to prove a point about how inaccessible the wish list is for female directors, here are nine directors who happen to be women who also belong on the wish list as Lionsgate hunts for a second director. These are in alphabetical order, with the exception of the final entry who would be my top choice.

Kathryn Bigelow

Duh. In fact, she’ll probably make the wish list as a token nod to gender diversity, and all she had to do was become the first female in history to win a best director Oscar. I don’t really have to explain this pick. She’s been directing hard action pictures for 30 years. She’s helmed the likes of “Near Dark” (a dusty vampire thriller that still holds up 25 years later), “Point Break” (which is really better than its camp-fueled reputation), the underrated “Blue Steel,” “Strange Days,” “K19: The Widowmaker,” the two-part guns-ablaze sixth-season finale of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and of course the Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker.” If Lionsgate wants instant critical respectability without breaking a sweat, Bigelow will be at the top of the list, regardless of gender.

Niki Caro

“North Country” is the definition of the kind of movie they just don’t make anymore. As recently as 2005, Warner Bros. gave Caro the reins to an all-star drama detailing a landmark 1984 sexual-discrimination/harassment suit. Lead Charlize Theron and supporting actress Frances McDormand both justifiably received Oscar nominations for the little-seen October 2005 release. The picture is a straight-up social issues drama, filled with character turns from Richard Jenkins, Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, Woody Harrelson and then-unknowns Amber Heard, Michelle Monaghan and Jeremy Renner. In 2005, it was one of any number of big studio dramas battling it out for Oscar glory. Today, it would be a front-runner purely by virtue of its existence. Caro’s picture personifies the sort of high-quality big-studio adult drama that is all but an endangered species, and she also helmed the dynamite “Whale Rider” back in 2002 as well. If every studio release were at least as good as “North Country,” I imagine most of us wouldn’t feel the need to constantly whine about the state of studio movies these days.

Catherine Hardwicke

Yes, “Red Riding Hood” was an entertaining whiff. I like it even while admitting it’s pretty bad (it’s certainly never boring and Gary Oldman is a hoot). But go back and watch the first “Twilight.” Here’s a dirty secret: It’s actually pretty good. It’s light on its feet, quirky, self-deprecating and utterly aware of its melodramatic nature. Unlike the self-serious sequels, which treat their respective source material like holy tombs (and probably would have cut “vampire baseball” out of fear of irreverence), the first “Twilight “is genuinely fun, willing to change little details and add character beats to keep the film engaging. Kristen Stewart is quite compelling as a more self-aware Bella while Robert Pattinson is allowed to be just a little goofy in the opening act (his biology class freak-out is pretty hilarious). Most important for the purposes of this current franchise, the supporting characters are wonderfully fleshed out and brought to life, giving the film a pulpy lived-in quality that none of the sequels can match (Bella’s friends are actually charming and have their own lives). Point being, if you’re among the many critics who wished that even a few of the supporting characters were a little more fleshed out in the first “Hunger Games” installment, why not bring on someone who knows how to build an aggressively lively supporting cast, one that arguably superceded the stars in at least one film? She wouldn’t be my top choice, but there would be some poetic justice to it nonetheless.

Mary Harron

Has any movie made in the early 2000s, save perhaps ”Requiem for a Dream,” aged as tragically well as ”American Psycho”?  The film got mixed reviews in its day, with many critics unable to look past the grotesque subject matter (and the even more grotesque source material) to notice that the film’s sex and violence were all but beside the point. Christian Bale turns in what will probably be the best performance of his career (certainly Patrick Bateman is as defining a turn as Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle) in a brutal satire of the 1980s “greed is good” corporate mind-set that tragically proves even more topical today as the ghosts of Reagan came back to haunt us in the guise of George W. Bush and corporate giants like Goldman Sachs. Had the film been better received in its time, perhaps Harron wouldn’t have just now helmed a theatrical follow-up, the upcoming ”The Moth Diaries” (she directed an HBO Bettie Page biopic in 2005). Not to repeat a theme (and it won’t be the last time I bring this up), but had “she” been a “he,” Harron probably would have a half-dozen features to her name by this point.

Patty Jenkins

She was supposed to be the mold-breaker. Hired late last year to direct Marvel Comics’ “Thor 2,” Jenkins was supposed to become the first female director to helm a mega-budget comic book tent pole (Lexi Alexander’s “Punisher: War Zone” cost just $30 million). But the rather mysterious “creative differences” excuse sent her packing, replaced by longtime television director Alan Taylor (director of the heartbreaking “Homicide: Life on the Street “series finale and the “Mad Men” pilot), which in turn led to a national grumbling among feminist film pundits and a very pissed-off Natalie Portman. Jenkins’ career is a perfect demonstration of the gender disparity in Hollywood. In an age where Marc Webb is handed the reins to “The Amazing Spider-Man ” after directing one moderately successful low-budget romantic comedy (“500 Days of Summer”), Jenkins has barely worked since directing the Oscar-winning “Monster” nine years ago. She recently won an Emmy for directing the pilot for AMC’s “The Killing,” but that’s pretty much all she’s done since 2003. If you haven’t seen “Monster” in a while, it’s a pretty great movie, and it’s certainly more than just Charlize Theron’s deservedly-Oscar-winning star turn (Christina Ricci is just as good). Call it poetic justice or merely good sense, but Lionsgate would be wise to snap up Jenkins and give her the keys to an even bigger franchise.

Mimi Leder

In the late 1990s, Mimi Leder was on her way to becoming one of the biggest female directors in modern history. But while male directors get whiff after whiff until their eventual “comeback film” (think Scorsese in the 1980s, from “Raging Bull “to “Goodfellas”), Leder was out after just one high-profile miss. Never mind that “The Peacemaker” was a frighteningly ahead-of-its-time action drama (and a painfully underrated one at that), never mind that “Deep Impact” was at the time the highest grossing film in history directed by a woman.  The critical and artistic disaster of “Pay It Forward” pretty much killed everyone involved, ending the film careers of Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment while fatally damaging Kevin Spacey’s prestige. Leder hasn’t directed another theatrical feature since that 2000 disappointment (she helmed the 2009 Morgan Freeman/Antonio Bandaras direct-to-DVD action flick “Thick as Thieves”).  She just started preproduction on a remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which, if it comes to pass, will be her first theatrical release in 12 years. If you want a female director who knows how to craft top-notch action, why not hire Leder?

Lynne Ramsay

In a gender-neutral world, Lynne Ramsay would be on all of the wish lists right now. After all, she made a splash last year with the fantastic “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” coaxing a career-peak performance from Tilda Swinton and crafting a powerful psychological horror drama that defies easy description or even common interpretation. It’s a powerful and gripping picture, her third feature no less. If “Chronicle’s” Josh Trank can end up with a dozen high-profile choices after making one terrific film, then Ramsay deserves her pick of the litter as well. Of course, the fact that Trank made his mark with a superhero deconstruction and was then offered a bunch of comic book superhero films is in itself a sign of Hollywood’s lack of imagination, which is why Debra Granik (who would also be on various wish lists in a just world) won’t be on this list. There is no escaping the several similarities between “Winter’s Bone” and “The Hunger Games” and I’d argue that choosing the helmer of the former is every bit as lazy as choosing Jennifer Lawrence to basically reprise her Oscar-nominated character in the first place. But Ramsay would be an inspired and outside-the-box choice, and arguably someone who can bring suspense and intensity to a franchise that lacked requisite tension the first time around.

Jennifer Yuh

With all the seemingly justified hubbub about Brenda Chapman getting canned from Pixar’s “Brave” last year, no one seemed to notice that Dreamworks (who hired Chapman to direct “The Prince of Egypt” 14 years ago) gave one of its prize franchises to a South Korean female director who promptly knocked it out of the park. I assume you don’t need me to remind you how much I loved “Kung Fu Panda 2.” It was my favorite film of 2011 and a splendid action dramedy that absolutely stands with “Toy Story 2,” “The Dark Knight” and “X2: X-Men United” on the list of all-time great genre sequels from the last 15 years.  The only reason she isn’t my top pick is because I wouldn’t want her taking the “Chasing Fire” gig to stand in the way of her directing “Kung Fu Panda 3.” But she absolutely deserves a spot on every genre wish list from now until she retires.

And my personal pick…

Kasi Lemmons

Yes, it would be groundbreaking/cool/etc. if the reins to today’s biggest new franchise were handed off to an African-American woman. But it would also be just-plain-cool if “Chasing Fire” were handed to the person who happened to direct “Eve’s Bayou” and “Talk to Me.” She directed three features between 1997 and 2007 (the middle one being the not-that-great “The Caveman’s Valentine” in 2001, which still featured a fine star turn from Samuel L. Jackson). But “Eve’s Bayou” is a terrific period drama that features one of Jackson’s best performances, period. ”Talk to Me” is a fine and thoughtful biopic about 1960s Washington, D.C., radio DJ Ralph “Petey” Greene (played by Don Cheadle), which features strong supporting work from Chiwetel Ejiofor (his pool hall conversation with Cheadle is the stuff of acting-class gold), Taraji P. Henson and Martin Sheen (even if Sheen’s best scene ended up on the DVD deleted scenes reel). I don’t pretend to know why she has worked so little in the last 15 years, but her lack of output has always (to me) personified the difficulty that minority and female filmmakers face in terms of having a steady output of movies even after they’ve had one or two successes.  Tokenism and/or affirmative action accusations aide, Lemmons has made two awfully good films and deserves a shot at the big leagues at least as much as the likes of Josh Trank and Marc Webb.

OK, your turn to pick.  Who would you want to see helm the next “Hunger Games” film?  It doesn’t have to be a woman or a minority, but try to be a little creative.

I’m just as tired as the next film-loving feminist of seeing the beauty myth played out ad nauseam on screens big and small. But the story here is neither Lawrence’s size nor even the Hollywood thin imperative, but rather why Lawrence was cast in the first place.

Why, in an industry that routinely casts underweight women in pretty much everything, would “The Hunger Games” team not pluck from its enormous pool of underfed talent? Katniss’ scrawniness is an actual plot point in the book; one of her recurring concerns before the games is putting on weight after a lifetime of being chronically hungry in order to both feel and appear stronger before entering the arena. (As L.V. Anderson at Slate points out, you can be starving and not be rail-thin, but that’s not how Katniss is described in the book.) In any other circumstance I might be mildly encouraged by seeing an actress cast in a major film who didn’t look emaciated: Lawrence is slender by any standard, but still curvier than many of her peers. Yet I can’t quite cheer this one, because Lawrence’s casting says more about the paucity of rich roles for young actresses than it does about any sort of shifting body standards.

“The Hunger Games” inhabits an unusual space: Not only were the books an enormous commercial success, but between the trilogy’s timing with Occupy Wall Street, a growing sense of unease about income disparity in America, and a greater amount of attention paid to feminist critique, the story is a magnet for critical analysis. Whichever actress was cast in that role was guaranteed to be taken seriously, and the producers also knew they had to cast someone who would be able to assume that guarantee with aplomb. They likely chose Lawrence because of her raw talent and her already burgeoning reputation as a Serious Actress, with her Oscar-nominated performance in “Winter’s Bone.” It was a good bet: Peter Travers says she “reveals a physical and emotional grace that’s astonishing”; Melissa Anderson at the Village Voice comments on her “particular gift for exuding iron determination”; and Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir notes how Lawrence “commands the screen with effortless magnetism.”

But I can’t help wondering if, in casting Lawrence, they took advantage of the chance to cast someone who oh-so-slightly veered away from the strict template of beauty. It was the perfect opportunity to placate the growing number of moviegoers questioning why only anointed beauties were being cast in major films; the still-present adulation of so-called curvy performers like Kate Winslet and Beyoncé, and Melissa McCarthy’s popular and critical embrace after “Bridesmaids,” showed that audiences were hungry for women who didn’t look like they were starved.

As a feminist moviegoer who is rightfully tired of seeing the beauty imperative stamped across every film I see, I’m the prime target for being placated by this gesture. Lawrence’s body, by being a shade heavier than her contemporaries’, becomes a statement: Her body legitimizes the film, and also legitimizes Katniss. It literally adds more weight to the character. “We can’t have an insubstantial person play [Katniss],” director Gary Ross told Entertainment Weekly. He was speaking of the psychic weight Lawrence brought to the role, not her physical weight. But when Hollywood defaults to rail-thin beauties for every role out there, is it any wonder the two become conflated?

Lawrence’s casting isn’t really the problem; it’s the dearth of complex, layered roles for actresses her age, who are more often cast as flimsy love interests with the barest of personality quirks to make her “relatable.” (“500 Days of Summer,” anyone?) Since most roles for that age group are written to be basically interchangeable, it makes sense that possessing another sort of gravitas — a figure that barely bent the rules of Hollywood norms — would be an asset during casting. (We saw much the same with Kate Winslet, another talented actress who, from a very young age, rarely got to do comedy in part because her womanly figure made it easier for casting agents to see her in roles requiring emotional maturity.)

The parade of romantic comedies, “quirky girl” roles, and male-fantasy ciphers (sorry, Lisbeth Salander, I’m looking at you) offers types, not characters. Even actresses once deemed “serious” are too often offered paltry material: Kristen Stewart’s talent shone even in child-actor roles like “Panic Room,” but it is largely wasted on Bella, who could be played by essentially any actress able to stand upright. And when one of the best roles for young actresses is a Muggle, we’re in a sorry state of affairs. If we had meatier roles for women, the search to find the most “substantial” actress to fill the role might not feel as urgent. And perhaps that would have allowed a similarly talented actress who fit Collins’ physical description of Katniss (including the dark hair and “olive skin” that made some question why the role went to a white actress) to inhabit the role.

The meaty roles for women have become concentrated among a handful of actresses. We see this most clearly in niche roles, like sexy-lady-over-60 — I mean, name two who aren’t Helen Mirren. It’s a little more diffuse for midcareer actresses (think Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett) but actresses under 25 are more likely to be cast as a talking cream puff than anything that allows for nuance.

In the end, I do think Lawrence was an excellent choice for the role, and I’m not trying to nitpick her casting or performance; books-to-films are rarely known for their fidelity to the original, and “The Hunger Games” got it right more often than not. Most important, I’m not trying to nitpick her figure, which, in a normal world, would be understood as a tool a talented actress plays to embody a character who, despite her impoverished hunger, never lapses into frailty. More than that, I’d like for her body to be beside the point. But in the climate we currently have for roles for young actresses, that’s an impossibility.

Well, yes. But also: no. “The Hunger Games” series was already hugely popular, long before the movie was even shot. The first book alone has spent well over two years on the USA Today bestseller list. The films will doubtlessly promote the sales of even more books, but isn’t that a bit beside the point? The books made the movie a hit, not the other way around. The real story of this weekend’s record-breaking box office returns for the movie version of “The Hunger Games” is the awesome cultural power of young readers, especially young girls.

Monday morning media coverage credited producers and marketers at Lionsgate for the movie’s success, and by all accounts (I haven’t seen it myself), the film is an effective adaptation of the books. But a good movie and a canny promotional campaign aren’t enough to make hundreds of people camp out in a tent city to await a movie’s premiere. That kind of enthusiasm only comes from a fandom, an organized, well-networked, convivial mass of people who really, really love something and want to talk about it — a lot.

Last week, I wrote about the professionals in the children’s library, bookselling and publishing worlds who helped make “The Hunger Games” a hit even before it was published in 2008. But as smart as those adults are in identifying and promoting books to young readers, they can’t create a fandom, either (although many of them are themselves fans). A fandom is a self-generating, self-reinforcing, snowballing phenomenon.

Before the Internet became part of everyone’s everyday life, a reader who was blown away by a book and dying to talk about it might insist that a friend read it, too. Today, she’ll still urge the book on her friends, but she’ll also go online to find equally obsessed readers who are already discussing it in a forum or blog. Over time, these fellow fans can become friends, perhaps close ones, even if they never meet in the flesh. They recommend new books to each other and circulate news about the favorites that brought them together in the first place.

Fan networks like these, not movie studio promotional campaigns, were what fostered the drumbeat of excitement leading up to the release of “The Hunger Games” movie. Marketers can egg them on by feeding them tidbits like casting news and poster art, but they don’t create the interest in the first place, and they can’t really control it.

For a long time, organized fandom was seen as primarily a guy thing. The two primary types of hardcore fandom — comic books and science fiction — had many female members, of course, but as the term “fan boy” attests, the most visible, vocal and vehement tended to be male. Meanwhile, the primary manifestations of female fandom were the screaming preteen followings of bubble-gum pop bands: avid, yes, but dismissed as the passive, easily manipulated consumers of disposable, prefab culture.

The success of the “Hunger Games” film is the apotheosis of a new kind of young female fandom, one that has its roots in books and owes its flourishing to the Web. The old, predominantly male fandom for comics and science fiction preexisted the Internet and was one of the first subcultures to take advantage of it. The fandom for “The Hunger Games” grew (in part) out of forums and other networks set up by “Twilight” fans, which in turn grew out of the fandom for “Harry Potter.” These fandoms, which flourished during the advent of social media, are certainly not entirely female — any more than science-fiction or comics fandoms are entirely male — but most of the people who establish, maintain and participate in them are young women.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the weekend audience for “The Hunger Games” was 39 percent male, “another sign of a cultural juggernaut.” The most recent “Twilight” film, the Times pointed out, attracted an audience that was only 20 percent male. But “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1″ still brought in $138 million (domestic) on its first weekend, compared to $155 million for “The Hunger Games”; nothing to sneeze at.

Like the Times, you could look at these figures as an indication of how much better a movie franchise can do when it appeals to young men as well as young women — or you could just acknowledge the fact that a movie can now be a big hit without appealing to young men at all. As far as their stories go, “The Hunger Games” doesn’t have much in common with “Twilight” (or, for that matter, with the Harry Potter series), but what all three hugely popular franchises do have in common is their origins in bestselling books whose readership was either primarily female or at most 50/50, and whose most active fans are girls.

That’s a big change from the days when conventional wisdom held that any popular blockbuster had to speak to the movies’ core audience of teenage boys. That was the notion that gave us two decades of superhero pictures. Maybe it was even the thinking behind this season’s most notorious flop, “John Carter.” If I were a movie producer, I’d be hightailing it out of the comic shop and turning to the YA shelves in my local bookstore to look for my next project. That’s where the girls are.

Further reading

The making of a blockbuster: a Salon exclusive on the behind-the-scenes story of the readers and booksellers who launched the Hunger Games franchise

The New York Times on the record-setting ticket sales for the opening weekend of “The Hunger Games”

Obsessive female fandom is having a moment. First it was the “Twilight” books and tie-in vampire-chastity-fantasy films that still have women all over the world daydreaming about being brutalized by bloodsucking aristocrats. Now, just as the first film installment of “The Hunger Games” hits cinemas, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the X-rated fan-fiction novel based around the “Twilight” films, will soon be arriving in bookstores. They’re popular not only because they flip the classic narrative on women, but because they take on three issues key to young women’s lives — sex, class and power.

Although these bestselling series share a great many readers, devotees of one particular series or another will invariably contest that they have nothing in common. True, if you had to objectively measure the fortunes of Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan, “Twilight’s” milquetoast heroine, there is little overlap.

These are dark, violent, emotionally exhausting books. Packed with more violent body horror and buckets of blood than parents who buy them for their 14-year-olds probably quite appreciate –  certainly grislier than any equivalent series I’ve encountered aimed at young men. “Twilight” contains a scene where Bella literally has to have a cannibalistic vampire baby bitten out of her womb, and by about halfway through “The Hunger Games,” I was getting a little weary of the horrific torture sequences, the visceral fights to the death, the scaldings, stabbings and brutal police beatings, the enemies being gnawed to human jelly by genetically engineered nightmare-hounds, and just wanted to go away and read Cosmo Girl for a while. Actually, that’s a lie — I loved every second.

Both series have male fans, but they’re not specifically catered to, in the way that James Bond films, Bruce Willis films or, indeed, 95 percent of the rest of the output of the film and fiction industries don’t particularly concern themselves with the female gaze. In these series, it is women and girls who have desires, passions and problems, women and girls who act on those desires or are consumed by them, and men who are the objects of desire, even if they show up in the story addicted to the whiff of the heroine’s funky-smelling blood.

Like the Bronte novels, “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” are fairly oozing with repressed eroticism. One can no more write about extramarital sex in a book aimed at modern teenage girls than one could in a Victorian novel, but the implication drips from every page, which possibly explains the enormous volume of smutty fan-fiction on the Internet making the implicit explicit. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” meanwhile, was originally written as “Twilight” fan-fiction, and part of the reason that it is less interesting as a social phenomenon is that its apparatus of censorship does not work in the same way that it does in the teen novels, where the frantic tension of suggestion and repression drives the plot, and readers are encouraged to fill in the gaps with their own feverish imaginings — which they do, in graphic detail, on the Internet.

These stories are also fairly obviously about class. Vampire novels are straightforward tales of class treachery, all about wanting to offer yourself to wealthy social leeches who will, in return, grant you power, beauty, eternal life and pots of money; one somehow never reads about vampires who have to work for a living. “The Hunger Games,” meanwhile, is an occasionally eye-watering narrative arc about economic inequality and social unrest, in which the hero finds herself fighting to survive between the cruel, cartoonish extravagance of an overbearing ultra-capitalist state and the murky machinations of the neo-Stalinist rebels. Sex, class and power: Three things that are on most little girls’ minds far more than polite society likes to contemplate. No wonder these films have them screaming in the streets.

It’s an interesting scenario, I suppose, but how did this happen? Nothing in Collins’ books, or in director Gary Ross’ simultaneously chaotic and desultory film adaptation, even tries to explain that (or seems aware of it as a narrative problem). Somewhere amid the civil war and widespread destruction and rise of a totalitarian state that forms the scanty back story of “The Hunger Games,” the collective knowingness and jadedness and pseudo-sophistication of the Information Revolution society has evaporated. Or at least it has among the subject populations, in the outlying districts annually compelled to supply young combatants to the Hunger Games. Where Collins’ heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, in the movie) grows up, in the Appalachian coal-mining zone called District 12, willowy women in print dresses with flyaway hair live in tumbledown shacks, looking for all the world as if they just stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photo essay from 1937. (Have blue jeans for women and indoor plumbing been abolished, along with consumer society, corporate capitalism and postmodernity in general?)

If that sounds like too much intellectual heavy lifting to apply to a girl-centric action-romance that mashes up a bunch of disparate influences and ingredients, from Greek mythology to Orwell to Stephen King, well, it probably is. My point is that the patchwork of “The Hunger Games” never really holds together or makes any sense, except as an elementary fairy tale about a young girl’s coming of age and an incipient romantic triangle (which is the focus of the film, far more than the book). In Collins’ novel, the first-person narration and Katniss’ intense physical and psychological struggle seize center stage and overwhelm the threadbare situation, at least to some degree. Ross’ movie version — co-written by him, Collins and Billy Ray — is probably adequate to satisfy hardcore fans, but only just. It’s a hash job that offers intriguing moments of social satire and delightful supporting performances, but subsumes much of the book’s page-turning drama to sub-“Twilight” teen romance. Of course it will make a zillion dollars opening weekend, but I’m not convinced this franchise will be as ginormous, in the long run, as Hollywood hopes.

It’s easy to be seduced by something that’s both as clever and as successful as “The Hunger Games,” and to conclude that it must have something to say about violence and the media and changing ideas of femininity and other hot-button topics it appears to address. But as becomes even clearer in the movie version, it really doesn’t. It’s a cannily crafted entertainment that refers to ideas without actually possessing any, beyond an all-purpose populism that could appeal just as easily to a Tea Partyer as to a left-winger. If not more so — the true villain of “The Hunger Games” is the all-powerful state, and the population of Panem’s capital city (in Ross’ movie, and to some extent in the book too) is a decadent, affected and polysexual media elite, whose outrageous peacock fashions suggest the court of Marie Antoinette appearing in a Duran Duran video.

In fact, “The Hunger Games” is precisely the thing it pretends to disapprove of: a pulse-elevating spectacle meant to distract us from the unsatisfying situation of the real world, and to offer a simulated outlet for youthful disaffection and anxiety (in this case, the anxieties of girls and young women in particular). Bread and circuses, only without the bread, and pretending to be anti-circus. I’m not claiming that’s anything new in pop culture, and it certainly isn’t a crime. Furthermore, the shapeless politics of “The Hunger Games” have very little to do with the question of whether it’s any good, although they do illustrate how calculated the whole project is.

About one ingredient there can be little question: “The Hunger Games” announces Jennifer Lawrence’s arrival as an A-list movie star, likely at or near the level of “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart. I’m not sure that Ross — a longtime Hollywood insider who co-wrote “Big” for Tom Hanks, and wrote and directed “Seabiscuit” — asks Lawrence to do half as much acting as she did in “Winter’s Bone,” but she commands the screen with effortless magnetism, a noble innocent who is gorgeous but not quite sexy, simultaneously a tomboy and a princess. As I saw clearly for the first time, the character is clearly meant to invoke Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt. When her younger sister’s name is drawn, against all odds, at the annual “reaping” for Hunger Games contestants, Katniss steps forward to take her place, beginning her appointment with destiny and her confrontation with the cruelty of the Capitol. She’s leaving behind her friend, hunting partner and maybe-kinda boyfriend Gale, played woodenly, or perhaps beefily, by smoldering male-model type Liam Hemsworth.

As Collins’ readers already know, Katniss must battle to the death against 23 other “tributes” aged 12 to 18 — one boy and one girl from each of the 12 subservient districts — in an arena that appears to be a natural outdoor setting but may not be. Now we know why Ross and the film’s producers didn’t show us any footage of the actual Hunger Games combat in advance: They hadn’t shot any until last week. OK, that’s unfair. Most of the book’s Games encounters are here, in abbreviated form, but Ross and company have streamlined the story and altered several details (some significantly), and the whole thing feels ultra-perfunctory. Almost no actual bloodshed is depicted (in deference to the required PG-13 rating), and during the fight sequences cinematographer Tom Stern relies on a wobbly, nonsensical, quick-cut style that leaves you utterly unsure about who has killed whom, and may have you squeezing your eyes shut to avoid throwing up. The problem really isn’t the lack of explicit violence; far more important, we get no sense of the hunger, thirst, cold, disease and harrowing physical torment undergone by Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the shy, blond District 12 baker’s son who has long loved her from afar. OK, they get a few superficial nicks and scratches, but they look as well-fed and runway-ready in the second half of the movie as they did at the beginning.

I have many more bones to pick with the Games — the Cornucopia, used by the game designers to lure contestants into a free-for-all? So bogus! — but when you pull back and look at the fripperies around the edges of Ross’ “Hunger Games,” it becomes much more entertaining and nearly worthwhile. Stanley Tucci is amazing as Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Hunger Games broadcast. All of a sudden, this universe without media savvy becomes all about media savvy, all wrapped into this unctuous persona whose sincerity is so fake it becomes real (or the other way around), and whose dazzling smile is at once comforting and terrifying. As he so often can, Woody Harrelson turns Haymitch, a drunken past winner of the Games from Katniss’ district, into a fascinating and mysterious figure, even though the script gives him little to do. Wes Bentley plays a game designer who must frequently consult with Panem’s sinister president (Donald Sutherland, apparently playing Brigham Young), in expository scenes that aren’t in the book but provide helpful background.

I also dug Lenny Kravitz, playing a stylist named Cinna who grooms Katniss for the Games — the only person she meets in the decadent Capitol who has a shred of genuineness or integrity — and becomes her confidant. In his sly, androgynous sexiness, Kravitz has way more chemistry and connection with Lawrence than do Hemsworth or Hutcherson, playing the two lunkheads supposedly smitten with Katniss. I’d way rather watch a love story about Katniss and Cinna than the lightweight Twi-triangle inflicted on us by Ross, who has (with Collins’ permission, evidently) stripped his heroine of almost all her Artemis-like uncertainty about boys and romance. (In the book, you couldn’t be quite sure Katniss wasn’t a lesbian, at least at first.)

But we’re not getting Katniss and Cinna, of course, and we don’t get anything that feels remotely like an ending in this clunky, clumsy adaptation; the story reaches a certain point and the curtain simply drops. Wait another year and spend another $12, and you’ll get another chapter. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but that just seems mean (and neither the Harry Potter nor the “Twilight” series were quite this blatant about it). I realize it will probably work, or work well enough. “The Hunger Games” has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven’t screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they’ve tried. Go ahead and put that on your poster.