Jennifer Lawrence will play the feisty and combative Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games! Which will be directed by Gary Ross! Every last site, it seems, has been reporting, repeating and re-phrasing this announcement as if it…meant something. Why is always left to me to call a spade a spade with these things, or least throw in some perspective?

Hunger Games: The Movie will almost certainly be an acceptably mid-level romantic dystopian Rollerball action melodrama by way of Death Race 2000, Logan’s Run, The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Long Walk. It’ll be the same ritualistic, hazily-motivated crap, tailor-made for young sensation junkies and the don’t-know-any-betters. It’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…nothing.

Yes, it’ll probably make good money and might even become a three-picture franchise, but when have those things ever mattered in the great scheme? It shoots in the spring and comes out on 3.23.12.