The last time Oscar had ten nominees for Best Picture was way back in 1943.

The nominees that year were Casablanca; For Whom the Bell Tolls; Heaven Can Wait; The Human Comedy; In Which We Serve; Madame Curie; The More the Merrier; The Ox-Bow Incident; The Song of Bernadette and Watch on the Rhine, a fairly impressive list of prestige films. The directors of five of those films were nominated for Best Director. They were Michel Curtiz (Casablanca); Ernst Lubitsch (Heaven Can Wait; Clarence Brown (The Human Comedy); George Stevens (The More the Merrier) and Henry King (The Song of Bernadette).

Can we therefore assume that had there been only five nominees they would have been the films directed by those men? Not necessarily. Best picture and best director under the five nominee Best Picture rule did not always line up. In 1944, the first year of the reinstated five Best Picture rule, the nominees were Double Indemnity; Gaslight; Going My Way, Since You Went Away and Wilson. The Best Director line-up included the directors of three of them: Double Indemnity’s Billy Wilder; Going My Way’s Leo McCarey and Wilson’s Henry King. Missing were Gaslight’s George Cukor and Since You Went Away’s John Cromwell, replaced in the director’s race by Lifeboat’s Alfred Hitchcock and Laura’s Otto Preminger.

Conversely to the first question, can we then assume that had there been ten nominees for Best Picture in 1944 that Laura and Lifeboat would have been among them? Again, not necessarily. In the 11 years in which the ten film Best Picture rule applied, from 1933 through 1943, there were two Best Director nominees whose films were not among the Best Picture finalists: Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey) in 1936 and Michel Curtiz (Angels With Dirty Faces) in 1938.

Given the law of probability, however, it’s likely that Laura and Lifeboat would have been among the ten nominees for Best Picture of 1944. What then, would have been the other three? I’ll put my guessing cap on and venture to add Meet Me in St. Louis, nominated for four other Oscars and Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, both of which were nominated for one.

How does this help us handicap this year’s Oscars? It doesn’t, but a look at the Best Picture nominees of 1943 and the potential nominees of 1944, the last year Oscar made just a drastic change, does give us some comfort that the change may not be as drastic as we initially thought. Though the Academy’s intent is clearly a market ploy to open up the nominations to movies better known to the general public than when there are only five nominees, Academy members may just opt to nominate ten films that they discovered on their own. Does anyone really know how many Academy members go out to the movies as opposed to watching Academy supplied DVD screeners on their TV sets? TVs, no matter how large, tend to take blockbusters down to size. So while we may speculate on what might have been nominated over the last 65 years, we will never really know what the ten nominees may have been in any given year and we certainly won’t know what to expect Oscar nomination morning.