The big winner at Sunday’s 67th annual Golden Globes was James Cameron’s Avatar, coming away with awards for best dramatic picture and best director. But the reviews were a little tougher earlier in the month, when the movie received a notorious “black lung” award from Scenesmoking.org.
Despite accolades all-around from Hollywood, anti smokers are critical of Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr. Grace Augustine. The lusty, swearing environmental scientist sucks down endless Marlboro’s throughout the movie while heroically attempting to save the moon Pandora. Protestors accuse the film of providing the equivalent of $50 million in free tobacco advertising reports The New York Times.
Cameron’s response is, “I don’t believe in the dogmatic idea that no one in a movie should smoke. Movies should reflect reality. If it’s okay for people to lie, cheat, steal and kill in PG-13 movies, why impose an inconsistent morality when it comes to smoking?….”
“We were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body,” Cameron said. Dr. Augustine’s smoking and carelessness “is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”
Anti smokers are appalled at his reply, considering research has shown that PG-13 movies account for 2 out of 3 scenes involving tobacco which are regularly delivered to audiences of all ages. A third to a half of all new teenage smokers is a result of smoking in movies, the imagery reinforcing established behavior in adolescents. In August of 2008 The National Cancer Institute concluded that movies with smoking cause children to smoke.
Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said his Smoke Free Movies initiative took exception to scenes in “Avatar” in which an environmental scientist played by Sigourney Weaver drags lovingly on a cigarette as she works to save the moon Pandora in the 22nd century. And scenesmoking.org, which monitors tobacco mentions in films, gave “Avatar,” rated PG-13, a rating of its own: A “black lung.”
» Conservative commentators have railed against the film as a thinly veiled “no blood for oil” criticism of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, or as an attack against the American military, or something.
When a movie makes so much money, and generates so much conversation, it’s clearly not just a movie anymore. It’s a cultural touchstone.
Alas, critics don’t get to choose which cultural moments will resonate. If so, most of us would have picked a movie with a more substantive plot than “Avatar” — just as we would have chosen the witty Conan O’Brien to win the current late-night tussle against the populist but deadly dull Jay Leno.
“Avatar” has captured the public imagination because it does what movies are supposed to do: Take us somewhere we’ve never been before. Cameron’s technological expertise has created a world so vivid and spectacular that audiences can imagine themselves there. Thanks to the improved 3-D technology, it feels like we can reach out and touch Pandora.
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