Did Al Gore deserve to be awarded the Nobel peace prize?

Former Vice President and near US President Al Gore who post election devoted himself to environmental issues has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised both “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" that highlighted the consequences of climate change won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary was criticised by many US conservatives as alarmist and exaggerated.

On receiving the award Mr Gore said “I will accept this award on behalf of all the people that have been working so long and so hard to try to get the message out about this planetary emergency,”

Does this award vindicate Al Gore's message and do you think he is a worthy winner?

Participate in this weeks open survey Did Al Gore deserve to be awarded the Nobel peace prize?

Should Hollywood ban smoking in films?

Anti smoking groups have been campaigning hard for a ban of images of tobacco in all but films with R or NC-17 ratings.

Unsatisfied by an earlier promise that the movie industry’s trade group made to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.

The anti-smoking lobby argue that on screen smoking implies that more people smoke than the actual percentage of the population that do smoke and that with product placement incentives smoking and tobacco products that appear on the movies is on the rise.

The issues relating to smoking may only be the beginning as Hollywood is now facing the opening salvos of other groups campaigning to rid movies of portrayals of gun use, transfat consumption or other behavior that can be proved harmful to the public.

Universal Pictures is to implement the wishes of its parent company General Electric, that, with few exceptions, “no smoking incidents should appear in any youth-rated film” produced by the studio or its sister units, Focus, Rogue and Working Title Films.

Bill Condon who writes and directs films has argued that movies are supposed to reflect reality and to ban on screen smoking is to remove a detail that is one of the more defining aspects of a lifestyle.

Do you think that the depictions of smoking actually encourages the young to smoke? Will the absence of smoking detract from a movies realism?

Would the classic movie Casablanca still have been a classic without the smoking?

Participate in this weeks open survey Should Hollywood ban smoking in films?