"Chicago" Wins Hackademy Award [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
The movie musical "Chicago" may be in line for the Best Picture award at this year's Oscars, but it gets a "Thumbs Down" Hackademy Award from the American Lung Association (ALA) for its numerous scenes involving cigarette or cigar smoking. Two of the main stars of the movie smoke regularly throughout the film. Catherine Zeta-Jones smokes even while dancing, even though very few women actually smoked during the period when the movie was set. "Thousands of girls are going to start smoking because of that movie," said physician and anti-tobacco activist Stanton Glantz citing the "That's going to go down as one of the classic pro-smoking movies in history. If they had eliminated every single bit of tobacco from that film it could have been just as good." Glantz believes that tobacco company "product placement" - where corporations pay producers to include their products in films - has helped fuel a cinematic tendency [3] to depict smoking as glamorous [4].