Yu Katayama - Movie Ratings-Do they serve the Hollywood or the public?
For this assignment, I read the article called Movie Ratings – Do They Serve the Hollywood or the Public?, which was written by Moira Hudgson. Basically the author attacks the issue about the film ratings that we have in the society today and how these ratings are affecting the community and public in general. In the article, he compares the ratings back in the earlier days to the ratings that we have now. He believed the major change that occurred in the rating was the changes from X-rated to R-rated films. All the filmgoers, or people in general, tends to watch more of PG and R rated films today as it was stated in the article. Since these statistics are true, the industry or the studio are forced to make a film that are PG or R rated (that’s what the MPAA would call it…) because obviously they would make more money. I believe that’s one of the issues I think that needs to be solved because the priority for the studio is to make some bucks, not the public. In addition, with all the disorganized procedure that are going on in MPAA can also be harmful and inappropriate for the children that are not old enough to watch the adult contents. With all these kinds of problems flying around, it makes the film industry to focus on their job more difficult because their relationship with the public could go downhill. But was it necessary for people to change the rating from being X to R? Mr Romero said that “they should say V for violence or S for sex,� instead of calling it PG or R because I think those copyrighted trademarks can be confusing sometimes and it would make it a lot easier if they say the film is rated S (sex), for example. Maybe X would have been too much of a broad rating, but if there is no standard system for MPAA to rate films, it would make sense for them to have the films rated in the way which Mr Romero stated. Basically I just want to say that if MPAA have concerns for the public and the children, they should look closely at their system in order to receive positive feedbacks from the public. The last thing that they want to do is to have the children watching the inappropriate films because of the wrong ratings. The priority for them should be “people�, not the bucks. If we could see some changes within the organization in the next couple of years, the rating system that they have might become useful or they should just change the whole system in order to ensure the protection from the under aged children.