Three films dominated the year-end awards in 1961: West Side Story, Judgment at Nuremberg and La Dolce Vita, with the latter becoming the first serious foreign language contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination since Grand Illusion way back in 1938. Alas, when the nominations were announced, the Italian film had to settle for just four nods, for Best Director Federico Fellini, Screenplay, Art Direction and Costume Design, winning only for the latter.

West Side Story and Judgment at Nuremberg led the Oscar nominations with eleven nods each. West Side Story, which was the first ever musical to win the prestigious New York Film Critics award for Best Picture, was favored to win and ultimately did, taking home ten awards including Best Picture and Director, which was split between Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins who hated each other. Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg, which began life as a TV drama two years earlier, ended up with just two including one for Maximilian Schell reprising his TV role as the defense counsel.

Oscar’s other Best Picture contenders were Robert Rossen’s stark, haunting drama, The Hustler; J. Lee Thompson’s The Guns of Navarone, the suspense filled war drama which was a surprise Golden Globe winner; and Joshua Logan’s film of Fanny, which retained the Broadway musical’s lush score but jettisoned the songs’ lyrics in favor of spoken dialogue.

What, then, would be the most likely “second five” to join the “first five” in a ten film scenario for Best Picture? Once again, let’s look first at the nominated directors which included those of all the nominated films except Fanny. Logan was passed over for Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita would surely have been the sixth nominee.

The Directors’ Guild outdid themselves this year with 21 nominees which were whittled down to the usual five finalists. They included West Side Story’s Wise and Robbins; Judgment at Nuremberg’s Kramer; The Hustler’s Rossen and The Guns of Navarone’s Thompson. Fanny’s Logan was again overlooked, replaced this time by Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ Blake Edwards.

In addition to Logan, the sixteen non-finalists receiving DGA nominations were Marlon Brando for One-Eyed Jacks; Frank Capra for Pocketful of Miracles; Jack Clayton for The Innocents; Peter Glenville for Summer and Smoke; John Huston for The Misftis; Elia Kazan for Splendor in the Grass; Henry Koster for Flower Drum Song; Philip Leacock for Hand in Hand; Mervyn LeRoy for A Majority of One; Anthony Mann for El Cid; Robert Mulligan for The Great Impostor; Daniel Petrie for A Raisin in the Sun; Robert Stevenson for The Absent-Minded Professor; Peter Ustinov for Romanoff and Juliet and William Wyler for The Children’s Hour. Fellini’s omission can be explained by the fact he wasn’t a Guild member, but where was Billy Wilder for One, Two, Three, oddly missing from such a long list.

Which of these would have been the other four nominees? Certainly Breakfast at Tiffany’s position as one of DGA’s finalists along with its five Oscar nominations and two wins would have been the seventh. The remaining three slots would likely have been a tug of war between The Children’s Hour and Flower Drum Song with five nominations each, El Cid and Summer and Smoke with three each and Splendor in the Grass with two. It’s difficult to say, but let’s go with the three dramatic films, The Children’s Hour, Summer and Smoke and Splendor in the Gras over the musical (Flower Drum Song) and the epic (El Cid).