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Wednesday, Dec 5, 2012 9:28 PM UTC

Liberals stole my Oscar!

Shocker: The director of the anti-Obama fever dream "2016" blames his nomination snub on left-wing bias

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Topics: Dinesh D'Souza, 2016: Obama's America, Oscars, Liberals, Hollywood,

Liberals stole my Oscar!

If Hollywood wasn’t so liberal, Dinesh D’Souza says, he would have gotten the Oscar nomination he knows he deserves.

D’Souza’s wildly anti-Obama film “2016: Obama’s America” was snubbed this week when the Academy left it off of the list of 15 documentaries that will advance in the award ceremony’s voting.

“I want to thank the Academy for not nominating our film,” D’Souza said. “By ignoring ’2016,’ the top-performing box-office hit of 2012, and pretending that films like ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ and ‘This Is Not a Film’ are more deserving of an Oscar, our friends in Hollywood have removed any doubt average Americans may have had that liberal political ideology, not excellence, is the true standard of what receives awards.”

The film’s producer, Gerald Molen, who also won an Oscar for producing “Schindler’s List,” agreed: “Dinesh warned me this might happen,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “The action confirms my opinion that the bias against anything from a conservative point of view is dead on arrival in Hollywood circles. The film’s outstanding success means that America went to see the documentary in spite of how Hollywood feels about it.”

2016 wound up grossing a surprise $33.4 million domestically, but did not do quite so well with the critics: It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 27 percent.

By way of comparison, the two films D’Souza mentions, “Searching for Sugar Man” and “This Is Not a Film,” have scores of 95 percent and 100 percent, respectively.

Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com. More Jillian Rayfield.

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