I could go on and on for hours about Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's smash hit of a film, but you've been reading enough about that lately.

When Ally visits Jack in rehab and tells him that it isn't his fault he has a disease, I almost fell out of my chair.

That's not a sentence you hear too often when a conversation about addiction comes up. There's usually a lot of victim-blaming, a lot of negative self-talk, and a whole lot of stigma.

You can say all you want that addiction is a choice, but it really isn't that simple. And I think Jackson Maine's story makes that extremely clear.

People say that those addicted to drugs and alcohol just "don't have self-control." Yet we see Jack trying as hard as he can to break free from the confines of his addiction. He's trying. It just isn't working.

The science is simple: you're repeatedly putting something in your body. Your body gets used to it. It becomes routine. And when you cut your body off from the source, it craves it.

And that right there is why we should call addiction a disease and nothing less. We can't always control what our bodies crave, no matter how hard we fight it.

We can talk about how beautiful the music of the film is, or how we need to hand Lady Gaga the Oscar right now. Or we can take a second and acknowledge the biggest feat of this movie: opening up the conversation about the stigma surrounding mental health.

Addiction doesn't just affect the person struggling. It affects loved ones, it affects careers, it affects the public if it's a celebrity.

Addiction is a mental health disorder. Bottom line. So we need to start using language that treats it as such.

Jackson Maine was not a neglectful character. He didn't throw his life away. He fought every day. He felt wanted and needed by Ally. He felt safe. And that gave him more reason to fight.

But at the end of the day, it wasn't his fault that he had an addiction. Because addiction is a disease. And like so many mental health diseases, there isn't a cure. There's only the will to fight. And in my opinion, Jackson Maine did until the very end.