The 1951 Oscar race was expected to be between two critically acclaimed dramatic films, Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’ stage sensation, A Streetcar Named Desire with its twelve nominations and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, the second screen version of Theodore Dreiser’s acclaimed 1925 novel. Ultimately, however, Vincente Minnelli’s celebration of the music of George Gershwin, An American in Paris proved the winner.

Though generally regarded as having won the Best Picture Oscar by splitting the vote between the two heavy dramas, I’m not so sure that An American in Paris didn’t have enough clout to win on its own. After all, it was nominated for eight Oscars itself. In the final tallies, both An American in Paris and A Place in the Sun took home six and A Streetcar Named Desire took four. With Gene Kelly’s special Oscar clearly influenced by his work in An American in Paris, the film unofficially took home seven.

Kazan, Stevens and Minnelli were all nominated for Best Director as expected, as were John Huston for The African Queen and William Wyler for Detective Story, but Huston’s and Wyler’s films were shut out of the Best Picture race, incredible in the case of The African Queen, not as surprisingly in the case of Detective Story which faced stiff competition from Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis with its eight nominations. The big surprise among the Best Picture nominees was Anatole Litvak’s World War II spy thriller, Decision Before Dawn, which had received only one other nomination for its editing.

Certainly had there been ten nominees for Best Picture, both The African Queen and Detective Story would have been among them. The African Queen, rushed into release at the last minute in order to qualify for the 1951 awards, was already held in awe for its location filming and the once-in-a-lifetime pairing of Humphrey Bogart, who finally won his Best Actor Oscar, and Katharine Hepburn. Detective Story had been a highly successful stage play.

For the remaining likely three nominees for Best Picture, we should probably take a close look at the Director’s Guild nominations. There were twelve this year, including the directors of all five Best Picture nominees and Mervyn LeRoy. John Huston was not nominated for The African Queen as the film was not released in time for their consideration.

The other Directors’ Guild nominees were Alfred Hitchcock for Strangers on a Train; Laslo Benedek for Death of a Salesman; George Sidney for Show Boat; Richard Thorpe for The Great Caruso; Henry King for David and Bathsheba and Michael Gordon for Cyrano de Bergerac, the 1950 Oscar winner for Best Actor, Jose Ferrer, which was released too late for Directors’ Guild consideration then.

Certainly Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock’s return to form after a five year period when nothing he did seemed to go right, would have been included even though it only received one other nomination for its cinematography. Death of a Salesman, from Arthur Miller’s oft performed play, was well thought of at the time, though several stage and TV versions later it is not generally considered the definitive version. A Best Picture nod at the time, however, would not have been unexpected, increasing its haul to six nominations.

The last slot would probably have gone to The Great Caruso which had been nominated for two Oscars and won one, though I’d like to think that Robert Wise’s science fiction masterpiece, The Day the Earth Stood Still might have become that rare Best Picture nominee without a single other nomination. It had, after all, won a Golden Globe as the Best Film Promoting International Understanding and had been nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for Bernard Herrmann’s thrilling score.