The Movie Rating System: Effective Or Useful?

Student Name Professor Name Course Date The Movie Rating System The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a group that assigns ratings to Hollywood and international films, has been facing criticism for quite some time. Parents, political leaders, and even some filmmakers claim that they don’t assign ratings to movies based on their content quality, star cast, and other similar elements. This continuous pressure and criticism have led the Motion Picture Association of America to require solid reasons for a movie’s rating to appear on their promotional materials. Is the movie rating system unstable and ineffective? Many people claim that MPAA rates a movie depending on personal interests, or when they have been paid heavily to rate it well (Jo & Sanghyunchoi 2015). Parents are also found complaining that the movies that are rated well by the Motion Picture Association of America are actually unsafe for their children in terms of containing vulgar or odd elements or poor stories. Most of the films, including several Hollywood projects, have been called as uninformative and useless. For example, Apollo 3 talks about the lifestyle of astronauts and how they landed the moon for the first time. Some people argue that the movie’s cinematography is poor, so as the performances of its stars. However, MPAA rated Apollo 3 good and called it one of the best science-fiction movies of all time (Wang & Liu 2017). Similarly, Titanic was rated excellent upon its release in November 1997. The Motion Picture Association of America representatives even called it a family-friendly movie, but the fact is entirely different. There are numerous kissing scenes in Titanic, which are obviously not good for our children. A family-friendly movie is the one that contains no or a few romantic scenes, but Titanic has loads of them, which is not an issue since various Hollywood movies con...