What will win this year’s Oscars? At this point no one knows. There is no early favorite as there was at this time last year with Killers of the Flower Moon, which had already been seen at Cannes, and Oppenheimer which opened in wide release the third week in July on the same day as Barbie.

It’s certainly a different cinema landscape than it was sixty years ago when My Fair Lady, sight unseen, was the presumptive favorite based on the enormous success of the Broadway musical.

At this time in 1964, only two of the year’s five eventual Best Picture nominees had been released. Dr. Strangelove had opened in January and Becket in March. Mary Poppins would open later in August. My Fair Lady and Zorba the Greek would not open until December.

Interestingly, the five nominees for Best Actor that year were all from Best Picture nominees – Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole from Becket, Peter Sellers from Dr. Strangelove, Anthony Quinn from Zorba the Greek, and winner Rex Harrison from My Fair Lady. The only Best Actress nominee from a Best Picture nominee was Julie Andrews from Mary Poppins, the only Best Picture nominee that didn’t have a Best Actor nominee.

The big shock of the nominations announcement was the failure of Audrey Hepburn to secure a nomination for Best Actress for My Far Lady. Early speculation was that the fight for the win would be between Hepburn and Julie Andrews who originated the role of My Fair Lady’s Eliza Dolittle on Broadway. Also failing to receive a nomination for Best Actress was Deborah Kerr who had two films, The Chalk Garden and The Night of the Iguana, in contention in other categories.

In place of Hepburn and Kerr, the Academy nominated former winners Anne Bancroft in The Pumpkin Eater and Sophia Loren in Marriage Italian Style, along with first-time nominees Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Kim Stanley in Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Stanley won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for her performance.

While My Fair Lady, Harrison, and Andrews were all but certain to win their categories, there was less certainty in the race for Beat Director. George Cukor was favored to win for My Fair Lady but he faced strong competition from Stanley Kubrick who had won the award for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle for Dr. Strangelove even though they gave their Best Picture and Actor awards to My Fair Lady and Harrison.

Cukor’s Directors Guild of America win for My Fair Lady settled that.

The supporting awards were both wide open races.

Edmond O’Brien had won the Golden Globe for Seven Days in May while Martin Balsam, who won the only other existing award for Best Supporting Actor, that of the National Board of Review, was not nominated.

Also missing from the list of Oscar contenders in the category was Golden Globe nominee Cyril Delevanti as Deborah Kerr’s 100-year-old grandfather in The Night of the Iguana.

Previous Oscar winner O’Brien’s competition consisted of fellow former winner Peter Ustinov in Topkapi and legendary first-time nominees John Gielgud in Becket, Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, and Lee Tracy in The Best Man. All but Gielgud, who is barely in Becket, were considered strong contenders. The winner was Ustinov who had been nominated in the Best Actor – Comedy or Musical category at the Golden Globes.

Competing for Best Supporting Actress were three of the screen’s greatest character actresses – Gladys Cooper, Edith Evans, and Agnes Moorehead, all of whom had been nominated before but hadn’t won. Evans had been nominated the year before. Cooper and Moorehead hadn’t been nominated since the 1940s.

Evans won the National Board of Review Award for The Chalk Garden and Moorehead won the Golden Globe for Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Cooper, a coattail nominee for My Fair Lady, had sentiment on her side as she was scheduled to reprise her Broadway role in The Chalk Garden but overtime on My Fair Lady and a pending start date for her TV series, The Rogues, forced her to drop out. Evans, who played the part in London, was given the role in her place.

Among those who failed to receive a nomination in this category were Ann Sothern in The Best Man and Glynis Johns in Mary Poppins.

The other two nominees were unknowns – Grayson Hall in The Night of the Iguana and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek. Kedrova was the surprise winner.

Kedrova later won a Tony for reprising her role in the 1983 revival of the 1968 Broadway musical version of Zorba the Greek called simply Zorba.

If 1964 was a great year for American and British films, and it was, it was also a great year for international films.

The Oscar for Best Foreign Film went to Italy’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, directed by Vittorio De Sica, over France’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, directed by Jacques Demy; Japan’s Woman in the Dunes, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara; Sweden’s Raven’s End, directed by Bo Widerberg; and Israel’s Sallah, directed by Ephron Kishon.

Teshigahara received a Best Director nomination for Woman in the Dunes the following year when the film was first released in Los Angeles.

All films mentioned are available on home video and some may even be available for streaming at some point.

Note: Sallah was only released on VHS. Raven’s End is available as part of a set of four Widerberg films from Criterion in 2023 and is not to be confused with similarly titled films from elsewhere.

Happy viewing.