Listening to a stodgy older very religious woman talk about reading the first book of The Hunger Games trilogy.

“It’s sooo weird,” she said.

By genre standards though it is a great book, it’s not really weird at all. Not compared to some I could have her read. But no matter – it is kind of odd (and great) hearing non-geek people talk about books that in my childhood during the 80s would’ve been constrained to the absolute ghetto of culture.

Of course, stuffy Slate critics and other assorted curmudgeons will never grant that such fare is better than their preferred boring white male midlife crisis bromidic melodramas, but it is. Similarly, Catching Fire the film will never make any year-end “best of” lists even though it is also a better film – sometimes achingly better – than the critical darlings about starving orphans playing soccer in Armenia or whatever latest bullshit fervor they are on about.

Even though genre is ascendant these days and – as Catching Fire does – deals with the concerns and problems of the real world better than high culture and even middle-brow culture, the film and films like it will never be granted admission to the club.

Fine with me. Such people only punish themselves, as the best scene in any movie this year is in Catching Fire when the robotic cameras in a cold-swept courtyard are panning and tilting around Katniss and Peeta as they mime a hot-blooded love affair for a deluded-yet-demanding Capitol audience a thousand miles away – an audience which when the two were in the arena a few months before would’ve been just as entertained by seeing them mutilated and then slaughtered.

Very powerful scene among many in the film, and one with more to say about our current world of drone wars, inhuman entertainments, mass delusion, and inequality than any movie this year but which will go unremarked by the stuffed-shirt critic cadre.

But as I said, these protectors of something not worth protecting are only hurting themselves as the world is changing all around them.