Big was still in in 1957, but a transposed TV drama a la Marty managed to sneak in amongst the five nominees for Best Picture.

Joining The Bridge on the River Kwai; Witness for the Prosecution; Peyton Place and Sayonara in the Best Picture race was Sidney Lumet’s first feature film, Twelve Angry Men based on a 1954 Studio One presentation directed by Franklin J. Schaffner.

Lumet made the cut for Best Director as did the directors of the other four nominated films: David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai; Billy Wilder for Witness for the Prosecution; Mark Robson for Peyton Place and Joshua Logan for Sayonara.

Today, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Alexander MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success and Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd would easily grab three of the remaining slots, but with no nominations for any of them, they would more than likely have been passed over in favor of then more popular fare.

With no anomalies between the Best Picture and Director nominations, we have to look elsewhere to find all five likely nominees should Oscar have gone to a ten picture slate in 1957.

Let’s look to our old friends, the guys who make up the Directors’ Guild of America for guidance.  Once again they nominated seventeen semi-finalists which they then whittled down to five finalists, the same five Oscar anointed, eventually predicting the outcome of the Oscar race by bestowing their award on David Lean who had already picked up similar honors from the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes.

The DGA’s list of semi-finalists did include Kazan but not Kubrick and not Mackendrick.   Also included were George Cukor for Les Girls; Stanley Donen for Funny Face; Jose Ferrer for The Great Man; John Huston for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Stanley Kramer for The Pride and the Passion; Anthony Mann for Men in War; Leo McCarey for An Affair to Remember; Robert Mulligan for Fear Strikes Out; John Sturges for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral; Billy Wilder, nominated a second time, for Love in the Afternoon and Fred Zinnemann for A Hatful of Rain.

Certainly McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, a remake of his own previously nominated Love Affair, nominated for four Oscars of its own, would have been up there.  Also the two highly popular musicals on the list, Funny Face, with its four nominations and Les Girls with its three nominations and one win were likely to have grabbed the seventh and eighth spots.

That leaves two.  I’d say Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison which was nominated for two and A Hatful of Rain, which was nominated for one would be the most likely to take them.