Neil Patrick Harris has yet another critic of his Oscar hosting duties last Sunday night. Glen Greenwald, along with director Laura Poitras, picked up a little gold man for Best Documentary for the Edward Snowden film, Citzenfour. The film is about the revelations made by former Snowden in Hong Kong before he went into exile in Russia. Harris joked that Snowden could not attend…
“for some treason.”
Greenwald told BuzzFeed News he’s trying to not let it bother him.
“I’m just gonna go ahead and treat it as a joke. I thought it was pretty pitiful, given Hollywood’s fondness for congratulating itself for doing things like standing up for McCarthyism and blacklists. So to just casually spew that sort of accusation against someone who’s not even charged with it, let alone convicted of it, I think is, you know, stupid and irresponsible. But I’m trying not to make too much out of it… Although I’m not succeeding.”
Greenwald said about his motivation for making Citizenfour, which debuted last night on HBO.
“I genuinely feel like when we are given this [NSA] archive [by Snowden] and given the responsibility to report it, one of the responsibilities was to try and maximize the impact and to disseminate the information as widely as we could. There are a lot of people who will only hear about these things and be exposed to the debate through the Oscars and through film, and so we just kind of see it as our responsibility to do it, as suffocating as it might be.”
UPDATE: For his part Snowden himself wrote this in a Q & A session on Reddit following the film’s win:
“To be honest, I laughed at NPH. I don’t think it was meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that’s not so bad. My perspective is if you’re not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don’t care enough.”
(via BuzzFeed)
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