Why I Didn't Care for the Oscars

I remember years ago hearing a speaker talking to youth about their entertainment choices. He told a story about his little boy not wanting to eat raisins. So he decided to try a little experiment. He gave him a bowl of cereal with one raisin in it. He watched his son pick out the raisin and go ahead and eat the cereal. The next day he put a couple of raisins in the bowl, and again the little boy removed them before eating the cereal. The next morning he put in a handful, and then watched as his son carefully picked out every raisin. Finally, he placed a bowl of cereal in front of his son with raisins mixed all through the cereal. The boy started to remove them one at a time, and then just gave up and pushed the bowl away.

The point of the story was to ask teenagers how much offensive material has to be in a movie before you decide it's just not worth trying to pick your away around it. Good question. I'm finding that as I get older, instead of becoming more tolerant of what I see in movies, I'm actually becoming less and less happy trying to ignore offensive material in my entertainment.

My wife and I fast-forwarded our way through the Oscars last night just to see which movies that we have not seen would get awards this year. I wondered why each year it seems like I've seen fewer and fewer of the nominated movies. This year we've only seen one of the films up for Best Picture.

And then it struck me--of the 15 movies up for one of the top awards (Picture, Director, Best & Supporting Actor/Actress), 10 were rated R and 5 were rated PG-13. Not one movie out of the 15 was rated PG or G. According to Kids-in-Mind.com (a very helpful resource for parents about the mature content of films--actually, Judy and I frequently use it to decide what we will see), these 15 movies included a total of over 150 "F" words. That's an average of more than 10 a film! (Granted, two of the films accounted for nearly 100 of that total, but most of the films had at least 2 or 3, if not more.) The only nominee for Best Picture which did not find "F" words necessary to produce quality dialogue was "The Reader"--and it got a 9 out of 10 for the amount of sex!

Some will say that such films are realistic and serious and true-to-life. Maybe. But I can remember when Hollywood was able to make Acadamy Award winning movies without vulgarity, nudity, simulated sex acts, or realistic visual effects of someone's head being cut off.

So when I look at the movie listings on a Friday night, I find myself wondering, "How many raisins can I keep picking out of my cereal?"

The answer seems to be "less than I used to" . . . but even at that, I'm pretty sure I'm putting up with more than Jesus would.