Smoking and the Oscars: A Scary Movie

Something to ponder on Academy Awards night: 57 percent of Oscar-nominated movies include tobacco imagery.

That's actually the lowest in several years, according to a post by Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who provides a fascinating spreadsheet of smoking-related movie facts that would be called trivia except for the habit's link to more than 480,000 deaths a year. The National Cancer Institute reports that smoking in movies is part of what gets kids started on cigarettes.

Probably every filmgoer can recite the reasons there is so much smoking in movies.  Lighting up a cigarette is used to define characters, telegraph messages about sex, portray historical customs, and give actors something to do while delivering lots of lines or waiting for something to happen.  And there is one more reason: the tobacco industry paid to make smoking a habit in movies, although it claims to have given up compensating films for showing cigarette smoking.

The SmokeFreeMovies project of the UCSF's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, both directed by Glantz, compiles exhaustive statistics on smoking and movies (like those shown below). Its findings on past links between the tobacco and movie industries, along with current claims, are here.

Smoking rates in the United States have reached a 50-year low, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in November. In 1965, over 42 percent of the adult population smoked; by 2014 it fell to 18 percent.  According to Tim McAfee, the director of the CDC Office on Smoking and Health, rates remain higher than average in some populations, including "the less educated, American Indians/Alaska Natives, men, people who live in the South or Midwest, people who have a disability, people with mental health issues, those who abuse drugs or alcohol, and people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual."

The rates came down gradually over decades, supported by a broad public health campaign. It included a ban cigarette advertising on television in 1971, although e-cigarette ads are not currently regulated. The International Business Times provides a review of cigarette advertising history (and where it might have gone).

So you won't be bombarded with cigarette commercials during the many breaks in the Oscar telecast. You might want to use those commercial breaks to consider how the movies have become the most powerful and harmful promoters of smoking and whether regulation is appropriate.  Should movies with smoking receive an R-rating?  SmokeFreeMovies says that would prevent almost 200,000 adolescents from initiating smoking every year and prevent 50,000-60,000 deaths annually in the coming decades.

Is that the happy Hollywood ending we all want to see?

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