Hey Oscar, Mind If I Bum a Smoke?

I think it’s a little ironic that this year’s Oscar ceremony falls on the heels of Cancer Awareness Week. On one hand, we have a week dedicated to making people aware of the many ways we can potentially put ourselves at greater risk for developing cancer. On the other, we’re celebrating an industry that makes films that feature people casually doing some of the very things that increase those risks, such as smoking.

I’ve seen three of the five movies nominated for “Best Picture,” and for the life of me, I can’t remember if anyone smokes in them. I can, however, tell you that one of them features violence, one features drug use, and all of them contain profanity. Each of those criteria is considered when rating a film, but interestingly enough, whether or not characters smoke has absolutely no bearing on how a film is rated.

Don’t get me wrong, I love movies. As I kid, I imitated my favorite movie stars, and as an adult, I look forward to the red carpet coverage almost as much as the ceremony itself. Judging by Oscar’s television ratings and the many magazines dedicated to the awards, the fashion, and the parties associated with the show, I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. Knowing this, and given all the horrible, tragic things we know about smoking, I wonder why filmmakers and film raters don’t take smoking into consideration when making or rating a film.

I checked out filmratings.com to try and understand how movie ratings are determined and found some interesting information. The site says this of G-rated films: “nudity, sex scenes, and scenes of drug use are absent.” Maybe G-rated movies don’t show anyone snorting cocaine off bare breasts, or injecting heroin in a dark, deserted alley, or even smoking pot at a house party, but there are plenty of characters using tobacco, which of course contains nicotine, a substance so addictive that many have compared its powers to the illegal drugs featured in many R-rated movies. A study published in the March 24, 1999, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that more than two-thirds of fifty G-rated, animated films featured tobacco or alcohol use in story plots. And we wonder why kids start smoking so young and think nothing of it.