Dinesh D'Souza's '2016' Movie: Winner at the Box Office Snubbed by Oscar
Dinesh D'Souza's documentary "2016: Obama's America" failed to earn an Oscar nomination despite earning $33.4 million at the box office, and becoming the fourth highest grossing documentary in history. Of course, there isn't much an outcry inside liberal Hollywood. However, D'Souza didn't keep quiet about the Academy Awards committee snub.
"I want to thank the Academy for not nominating our film," D'Souza joked, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "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, isn't keeping silent either.
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"I was surprised," Molen, who won an Oscar for "Schindler's List," told FOX411's Pop Tarts column. "'2016' was never made with any particular award in mind nor [was it] looking for specific accolades from anyone. But as an industry practice it was submitted along with a number of other documentaries."
The film, which was released late last summer, examines the question: "If Obama wins a second term, where will we be in 2016?" It shows D'Souza "immersed in exotic locales across four continents" as he "races against time to find answers to Obama's past and reveal where America will be in 2016."
Filmmakers say that during D'Souza's journey "he discovers how Hope and Change became radically misunderstood, and identifies new flashpoints for hot wars in mankind's greatest struggle. The journey moves quickly over the arc of the old colonial empires, into America's empire of liberty, and we see the unfolding realignment of nations and the shape of the global future."
The film made more money than all 15 short-listed films such as "Searching for Sugar Man," "Ethel" and "Bully."
Molen told the Hollywood Reporter, "Dinesh warned me this might happen. 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."
He added, "'2016' loses an opportunity to compete in what most always perceived to be a fair business atmosphere. But no way, it is totally unbalanced and unfair... The left rules – for now."
FoxNews.com in its Pop Tarts section reports that while Molen was somewhat surprised, others in the media industry were not.
"Hollywood is seldom just about money. It's about propaganda. And if you defy the party line, you stand no chance of winning. So when Dinesh D'Souza's movie got passed over, I wasn't even vaguely surprised," noted Dan Gainor, VP of Business and Culture at the Media Research Institute. "Is that bias? Of course. Jack Nicholson was close: Hollywood can't handle the truth. And they can't handle disagreement. Their one-sided view of what deserves awards underlines that."
When D'Souza was asked by The Christian Post at the time of the film's release whether "2016" would have an impact on the presidential election, he said, "Well, the film is intended to [offer] a debate about what's the future of America. Nowhere in the film do we mention the election. We certainly don't tell people how to vote.
"The film is about the American dream and Obama's dream. In some ways it's about my dream, which is the immigrants' dream," he said. "Also worked in there is Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream an¬d the dream of the founders. In that sense it's very different. In some ways I was inspired to do this by Michael Moore. I feel embarrassed to say that because Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is an intellectual disaster, but nevertheless that film was about a controversial president and it was received at a time when one half of the country was for the president and one half was against him and it was dropped in the middle of an election.
"So that gave me the idea to make a film under similar conditions – controversial president, one half of the country is for him, one half is against him, and drop it in the middle of this year's debate," he explained. "But I wanted to make and have made a very different kind of a film that is not fast with the facts and is intellectually and factually very sound. So far, no one has alleged the contrary."
