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WINNIPEG - Talk about your backhanded compliments. Members of Hollywood's elite were honoured yesterday by a group of local high school students, but not for anything they'll be in a hurry to include on their resumes.
West Kildonan Collegiate's SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco) Team handed out their first annual Black Lung Awards, targeting movie stars and youth-oriented films that feature cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use.
The dubious distinctions were bestowed on some obvious offenders -- Al Pacino in Scarface, Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary and Johnny Depp, in pretty much everything.
But the group also singled out some surprise honourees, like Disney villainess Cruella de Ville, animated tech-expert Edna Mole from The Incredibles, and 11-year-old Dakota Fanning, who won SWAT's Second Hand Smoke Award.
"I never knew getting sick could be so fabulous, said Natalia Senilnik, one of the event's tongue-in-cheek emcees. "I wish I was an actress so I could experience this lifelong addiction, too."
When the group's members weren't doling out awards, they were bringing to light some interesting facts.
In April 2005, for instance, 19 of the 20 top-grossing movies featured smoking of some kind, and 13 of those 20 were considered youth-rated, they said.
And while actors in the 1970s and 1980s smoked on screen every 15 minutes or so, in the 1990s they lit up every one to three minutes.
Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California and a longtime anti-tobacco crusader, said there's ample evidence to suggest teens are heavily influenced by seeing actors smoking in films.
"Kids watching movies these days are going to come away with the impression that there's a lot more smoking going on than there actually is, and that it's a lot more glamorous than it actually is," Glantz said. "There's a long history of big tobacco (companies) paying Hollywood to get smoking in movies."
Glantz would like to see film ratings boards do the following -- automatically giving "R" ratings to films that show or imply smoking, running anti-smoking ads before films that do feature smoking, completely eliminating tobacco product placement in films, and requiring end-credit guarantees that productions didn't receive payoffs from tobacco companies.
Members with the Manitoba Film Classification Board declined to comment until after a meeting yesterday with Glantz.