If 1955’s Oscar wins for Marty flew in the face of industry moguls, 1956 was right up their alley. All five Best Picture nominees were major productions: Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant; The King and I and The Ten Commandments. The anticipated winner was, of course, Around the World in 80 Days, perhaps the most hyped movie of all time.

Master showman Michael Todd initially presented Around the World in 80 Days in Todd-A-O with a humongous supporting cast of then well known stars such as Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, George Raft and Charles Boyer whom he enticed by coining a new word for their walk-on performances: “cameo”, a word that has stuck ever since.

Around the World in 80 Days was nominated for eight Oscars and won five including, as expected, Best Picture. The King and I, which also took home five including one for Best Actor Yul Brynner, had been nominated for nine. Giant, considered Around the World’s most serious threat, won only one of its ten nominations, but it was an important one – Best Director, George Stevens.

The Ten Commandments won just one of its seven nominations for its Special Effects, while Friendly Persuasion had to be content with its six nominations.

Joining Sevens in the race for Best Director were the directors of three of the other Best Picture nominees, Around the World in 80 Days’ Michael Anderson, Friendly Persuasion’s William Wyler and The King and I’s Walter Lang. The fifth nominee was War and Peace’s King Vidor.

Granting a sixth Best Picture slot to Vidor’s War and Peace, based on his nomination over The Ten Commandments’ Cecil B. DeMille, we are still left with four other slots to fill in in a ten Best Picture scenario. For inspiration, let’s look to the Directors’ Guild list of nominees.

This year they went crazy nominating seventeen semi-finalists and five finalists. The semi-finalists included eventual winner Stevens, as well as his fellow Oscar nominees Anderson, Lang, Vidor and Wyler. DeMille was not among the other twelve. Instead they nominated John Ford for The Searchers; Alfred Hitchcock for The Man Who Knew Too Much; New York Film Critics winner John Huston for Moby Dick; Nunnally Johnson for The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; Henry King for Carousel; Joshua Logan for Bus Stop; Daniel Mann for The Teahouse of the August Moon; Carol Reed for Trapeze; Robert Rossen for Alexander the Great; Roy Rowland for Meet Me in Las Vegas; George Sidney for The Eddy Duchin Story and Robert Wise for Somebody Up There Likes Me.

The initial seventeen were whittled down to seven finalists: Stevens; Ford; Hitchcock; Johnson; King; Lang and Reed with Vidor being given the D.W. Griffith Award for his body of work.

I think we can forget about Johnson, King and Reed’s films. Neither The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Carousel nor Trapeze were nominated for any Oscars. Neither was Ford’s The Searchers but contrary to popular opinion, the film was well received at the time even if its reputation has grown over the years. I think it had as good a chance as any film nominated solely for Best Picture to have been.

Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much had only been nominated for one Oscar, but it won its category, a popular one, Best Song for “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera )”. It would easily have made the list.

That leaves two slots. Let’s give one to Lust for Life, nominated for four and winner of one (Best Supporting Actor, Anthony Quinn). Let’s give the other one to Ingrid Bergman’s comeback film and her second Oscar winner, Anastasia, which oddly had only one other nomination.

Those left out in the cold would include such now highly regarded films as Written on the Wind (which did manage to pick up a Supporting Actress award for Dorothy Malone); All That Heaven Allows; Tea and Sympathy and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.