Woody on KenCen blacklist?

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What do you have to do to get recognized by the Kennedy Center these days?Get your short stories published in the New Yorker and win the O. Henry Award?

Have one of the greatest stand-up comedy acts of all time?

Win three Oscars and be nominated for a total of 21 (including more best-screenplay nominations than anyone in history) as a writing-directing-acting triple threat?

Be one of the top male box-office stars (No. 8 in Quigley Publications' rankings) of the '70s?

Win a lifetime-achievement award from the Directors Guild and be one of just two people (Ingmar Bergman is the other) to win a Cannes lifetime-achievement award?

Write for some of the biggest names in early television? Appear on the cover of Life magazine?

Woody Allen has done every one of those things. Yet he continues to be passed over year after year for both the Kennedy Center Honors, which recognize a lifetime of achievement in American culture, and the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Why is he continually snubbed?

It's not that he has signaled (as he has in the past with the Oscars) that he wouldn't show up to accept such honors.

"I've never been asked," he admitted with obvious discomfort when I interviewed him recently.