A too-blue ‘Blue Valentine’?

Applying a rating to a movie is not a scientific process, which helps explain why decisions by the Motion Picture Assn. of America sometimes seem arbitrary. A recent spat between Weinstein Co. and the association over the assessment of an upcoming film makes the association’s inconsistencies all the more apparent.

The company is upset because its film “Blue Valentine” was designated NC-17 by the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration. Such a harsh assessment (which bars admission by children under 17) can be the kiss of death at the box office and can help take a movie out of Oscar contention. Faced with this problem, moviemakers can either file an appeal to an MPAA panel made up of studio executives and exhibitors (with some church groups as nonvoting observers), or edit out the offending material.

Weinstein has chosen to appeal, and it has a strong case. Its film contains an oral-sex scene with no onscreen nudity. The company points out that another recent film, “Black Swan,” contains a scene with the same sex act treated in a very similar way, the only substantial difference being that the participants are both women — yet it got a less restrictive R rating.

Such baffling contradictions abound. The decision is all the stranger because critics often complain that the MPAA treats homosexual sex acts more harshly than heterosexual ones, yet in this case it appears to have done the opposite. Perhaps even more frustrating for filmmakers is when the ratings board uses quantitative measures that don’t take context into account. In “The King’s Speech,” the title character, who has a speech impediment, repeats the “F-word” several times because he is able to curse without stuttering. Because repeated use of this word usually results in an R rating, that’s what the movie got, even though it is devoid of sexual content, violence or other objectionable material.

For all the complaints about the MPAA’s process, we’re hard-pressed to come up with a better way. The ratings board is made up not of experts or filmmakers or members of the Moral Majority but of eight to 13 parents, who must move to L.A. but are recruited from across the country. That’s a pretty good way of assessing parental opinion for a voluntary rating intended not to measure the artistic quality of a film but to give guidance to parents based on contemporary values. The board does make bad calls — sometimes egregiously so — and we think it could stand to stop counting curse words, overreacting to depictions of casual drug use and treating sex more harshly than violence. But there will never be universal agreement about something as subjective as onscreen offensiveness, and the system works far more often than it doesn’t.