Handicapping a ten nomine Best Picture race in 1963 becomes more daunting as the Directors Guild drops its by then traditional long list of semi-finalists and announces only the finalists.

The DGA finalists for 1963 were Federico Fellini for 8 ½; Elia Kazan for America America; Ralph Nelson for Lilies of the Field; Tony Richardson (the eventual winner) for Tom Jones and Martin Ritt for Hud.  Oscar followed suit in naming all but TV director Nelson, who was replaced by veteran Otto Preminger for The Cardinal.

Oscar’s Best Picture line-up, as it had the year before, included only two films for which its directors had been nominated: front-runner Tom Jones and America America.

Tom Jones was a phenomenon.  Its racy situations and dialogue, though rather tame by the standards of only a few more years, was like nothing the movies had seen before.  It was no surprise that it had already won the National Board of Review, New York Film Critics and Golden Globe awards and led the Oscar race with ten nominations.  America America, Kazan’s emigration drama based on the life an uncle, received five.

The Cardinal, Preminger’s film of Henry Morton Robinson’s best-seller about the life of a priest was replaced in the Best Picture line-up by Lilies of the Field, a comedy about nuns.  Hud, Ritt’s hard-hitting contemporary western, was replaced by the multi-generational western, How the West Was Won.  Fellini’s extravaganza, 8 ½, was replaced by an extravaganza of a different kind, which also happened to have been made in Italy  – the costly Cleopatra, which earned a total of nine nominations.   How the West Won had earned eight and Lilies of the Field had earned five.

A ten nominee scenario would certainly have included the three snubbed films.  Hud had been nominated for seven other Oscars; The Cardinal for six and 8 ½ for five, including Best Foreign Film, which it won.

That leaves us with two more to make the magical ten.  The Great Escape, which had been a box office winner, as well as a Golden Globe and Writers Guild nominee, wound up with only one Oscar nomination (for its editing), but it probably had enough supporters to make it onto Oscar’s short list anyway.   Figuring out the tenth nominee is not so easy.  Would they go with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the musical Bye Bye Birdie, the romantic Love With the Proper Stranger or go in another direction?

Though it only received two nominations, for lead actor and actress, Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life was a strong enough hit to cross over from the art-house to the mainstream even before Tom Jones made such leaps popular, making it a more likely contender than either more popular box office fare like The Birds and Bye Bye Birdie or other critically acclaimed art-house films such as The L-Shaped Room; Sundays and Cybele; The Four Days of Naples and The Leopard.