Oscar Winner Not Pleased With Neil Patrick Harris’s “Pitiful” Snowden Joke

Neil Patrick Harris has one more critic of his hosting duties at the Academy Awards Sunday night, and this time it's from one of the men behind an Oscar-winning film.

Glenn Greenwald is reportedly not laughing at the quip Harris made as he, director Laura Poitras and producer Dirk Wilutzky left the Dolby Theatre stage, Oscars in hand for Best Documentary Feature, Citizenfour.

The film is about the revelations made by former National Security Agency employee Edward 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," said Greenwald at the Governors Ball following the Oscars. "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," he concluded, before adding with a laugh, "Although I'm not succeeding."

Greenwald is a former columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for The Guardian, a leading British newspaper, as well as a constitutional lawyer and author of four books on politics and law.

Greenwald also spoke with BuzzFeed News about his motivation for making Citizenfour, which debuted on HBO on Monday.

"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," he said. "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."