I swear, I’m about ready to tell this whole Young Adult phenomenon to get its stupid teenage butt off my lawn before I turn on the sprinklers. And who wouldn’t feel that way, looking at how the brats of YA have been comporting themselves of late? We’ve had Cara Delevingne, star of Paper Towns – the new film based on a novel by John Green of The Fault In Our Stars – rolling her eyes at reporters as if she hadn’t just been paid millions of bucks to appear in the movie they were interviewing her about. Then we had Miles Teller, late of the YA hits Whiplash (not a grown-up movie), The Spectacular Now and the Divergent franchise, making a sexist ass of himself in Esquire.

Meanwhile, Josh Trank, Teller’s director on last week’s mega-flop reboot of the teen-centric Fantastic Four franchise, might have foredoomed his own big-budget studio debut’s box-office chances with a single tweet claiming studio interference in his “vision”. Trank wanted to return to smaller, more intimate movies – and that wish will likely now be granted, whether he likes it or not.

YA is taking over. Sundance has been YA Central for a while now, its latest winner being the tiresomely movie-obsessed tragicomedy Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (another high-school cancer victim – how many can there be?), which won after big nods in recent years for Precious and Whiplash. And just as this adolescent demographic pie-slice was well-served in childhood by the Pixar revolution, so it is now over-served by the post-Harry Potter/Twilight YA tsunami. The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner franchises are just the studio biggies (along with all things superheroic); elsewhere all of indieland seems to have fallen under the same spell. Paper Towns, hard on the heels of The Spectacular Now and The Fault In Our Stars, taps the same emotions and fears but the rewards are diminishing exponentially.

Might it be that this generation, raised to compete but not to win, with a safety helmet for every activity and trigger-warnings for those who savour offence like a crackpipe high, is just too nice to make great movies? I love the fact that kids are nicer to each other – less racist, more tolerant of difference, etc – but I like my art spiced with a measure of meanness, cultural vandalism and an instinct for cultural parricide. No one wants to kill their idols any more. No one ODs on heroin or throws TV sets out of hotel windows or drives Cadillacs into swimming pools any more.

Gone are the days of my youth, spent gobbing on the punk bands I loved and despising everyone at the first sign of “selling out”. Apparently they’ve fixed all that now, and the kids of today will never find it in their well-behaved little hearts to disgust or outrage me, their sere and senescent elder. As Leonard Cohen wisely once said, “Everything’s perfect; couldn’t be worse.”