As if winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards weren't enough, the musical Chicago also captured the best smoke-filled picture award at this year's Hackademy Awards, where it received the Thumbs Down.
The movie, which won because of its “multitudinous scenes of gratuitous tobacco use,” even featured Catherine Zeta-Jones smoking while dancing. Gangs of New York came a close second, but lost because it was rated R. Chicago, a PG-13 movie, was considered to have influence over a greater range of teens.
The Hackademy Awards, launched in 1996 by the American Lung Association chapter in Sacramento, employs area teens to rate movies for smoking content. Movies in which the characters do not smoke get the Thumbs Up, while smoke fests such as Chicago earn the Thumbs Down. Ironically, the movie was filmed in Toronto, which bans smoking in clubs and restaurants.
Neil Collishaw, research director at Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, said teens are influenced by the smoking they see in movies. In 1998, all major US tobacco companies signed an agreement that barred them from marketing to young people in any medium or form of entertainment, including movies. Although this made it illegal for tobacco companies to pay for product placement in movies, cigarettes still play a supporting role in many movies. The producers of Men In Black 2 say the cigarette brands that made an appearance in that movie received the exposure for free.
Collishaw's favourite example of tobacco revisionism involved the movie Superman II, in which Lois Lane was portrayed as a chain smoker of Marlboro cigarettes. In the comic book that inspired the movie, Lane never smoked. — Natalie Dunleavy, Ottawa