I think that if the casting specified white actresses only, that's pretty bad, though. Even if Lawrence is more than qualified for the role, the fact that they wouldn't consider someone biracial or Latina or whatever is a real strike against the producers.

I truly wish they'd have to justify Caucasian every time they used it. They just had a casting call for a new character on Fringe, and lo! Caucasian. A show with a regular black character, a regular bi-racial, and a formerly regular Latino guy. Did they cast those by mistake? On purpose? What was that?

Just because I think of Katniss as white (and would *laugh* if they cast anyone whose hair obviously needed straightening) doesn't mean they can't make it work with something else. I just don't consider it whitewashing, since the character seemed written as white, just that she can be played a different way.

billytea,

I flipped out at that part of the book. FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT. And the fact that the issue (in various incarnations) keeps coming up in the trilogy makes it even more disturbing and awful.

BTW, I did not know that Rue and Thresh were African American. Damn. As if all my buttons weren't pushed by the story anyway, this is going to fuck me up on screen.

Note that I've seen Winter's Bone, so maybe that's unfair to Ms Lawrence.

You mean you haven't seen it? Because she played oppressed very well in that.

I truly wish they'd have to justify Caucasian every time they used it.

yeah. There's really no reason that any of the characters in Hunger Games couldn't be any race. There's nothing in the story where race comes into play, unless I totally misread (like Jesse says, privilege!)or am misremembering. So many options to cast good people without regard to race.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

Sure, but the important thing to the story is that they are athletic, I think, not that they are blond.

there are specific descriptions of people from certain districts being athletic and blonde, but that's all I recalled except for Katniss herself being olive skinned.

I think that could have been a class shorthand, but it wasn't really emphasized.

lisah, you know I didn't get that. Katniss contrasted herself pretty specifically (skin tone, hair color) with the district 1 & 2 (?) people. So yes, there was a hunger element, but it seemed to me from those two in particular, there seemed to be a skin tone as well.

I thought it was class shorthand too - and why Kat's mother and little sister are blonde but she takes after her father - who was not in the same social class.

From Slate's review of Limitless, emphasis mine:

The guinea pig in this thought experiment is Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), an unkempt, unaccomplished writer with a book deal but no idea how to get past that tricky first sentence. (Director Neil Burger establishes Eddie's writer's block with the standard tableaux—the writer staring at a blank computer screen, the writer enjoying a midday cocktail—and with a more ingenious, more disturbing scene of artistic stagnation: the writer eating a cold pizza crust while perched on the toilet.