Brentwood Students Say It’s Time to #HelpOscarQ

Youth from Brentwood North Middle School and the Freshmen Center hosted Reality Check Long Island’s second annual Smoke-Free Movie event at Islip Cinemas. During the event Reality Check youth educated young people and their parents about the importance of asking the Motion Picture Association of America to assign a R-rating for all movies that feature tobacco use, or images.

Movies with smoking are expected to cause 6.4 million of today’s children and teens to become smokers. Congress took cigarette commercials off television half a century ago, but tobacco imagery is still a powerful presence in movies. This becomes especially obvious during Hollywood's award season, when studios go all out to promote some of the year's smokiest movies. This year alone, nearly 80% of live-action films competing for Academy Awards featured smoking — including two-thirds of the kid-rated films. That wave of publicity saturating old and new media channels puts a new generation at risk for addiction and premature death.

These companies have spent millions of dollars to make and distribute smoke-filled movies in the past year, including Bohemian Rhapsody(100+ tobacco incidents), Green Book(350+ tobacco incidents), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs(50+ tobacco incidents).

"The US Surgeon General has declared that movies with smoking cause kids to smoke in real life," said Judith Montauban Reality Check Coordinator. "State Attorney Generals have told the studios that every time they release a movie with smoking, they knowingly harm children. Now the big media companies need to hear from the rest of us — and there's no better time than now.

Reality Check is a statewide youth -initiative that focuses on educating and empowering youth to address the tobacco industry and their deceptive practices. Reality Check has made confronting on-screen tobacco promotion a part of its public health mission since 2003, and is uniting groups around the country using the #HelpOscarQuit hashtag to ask the big media companies to keep smoking out of movies that kids will see . For more information visit realitycheckli.org.

Reality Check LI is the youth component of the Tobacco Action Coalition of Long Island (TAC), funded by the NYS Tobacco Control Program through a grant administered by the American Lung Association.