With the recent announcement that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was returning to 10 best picture nominations -- something it hasn't done since 1943 -- fans and pundits have been discussing the pros and cons of the decision. Are there even enough good films these days to find five decent best picture nominees, let alone 10?
But over the decades, numerous quality films and box office hits have been shut out of the best picture race. Just this year, such critical and commercial favorites as "The Dark Knight" and "Wall-E" didn't make the cut. Consider this personal selection of randomly picked years of five nominees over the last eight decades of the awards.
The personal selections don't include foreign-language films.
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1927-28: Oscar's first year saw "The Racket," "7th Heaven," and "Wings" garnering best picture nominations, with "Wings" taking home the award. The premiere year also featured the category "Unique and Artistic Picture" -- with "Chang," "The Crowd" and "Sunrise" earning nominations, and "Sunrise" winning the award. The academy did away with the category after that year.
Among the films absent from the best picture nominations that year were Buster Keaton's greatest work, "The General"; Cecil B. DeMille's lavish telling of the life and death of Jesus Christ, "The King of Kings"; Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster thriller, "Underworld"; the Harold Lloyd comedy "The Kid Brother"; and Tod Browning's wonderfully creepy "The Unknown," starring Lon Chaney and a young Joan Crawford.
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1930-31: The academy entered its first full decade with these best picture nominees: "Cimarron," which won, "East Lynne," "The Front Page," "Skippy" and "Trader Horn."
If there had been 10 nominations that year, among the leading contenders could have been the Marx Brothers' wild and crazy "Animal Crackers"; the witty Ernst Lubitsch musical "Monte Carlo"; the gangster film "Little Caesar"; the World War I drama "The Dawn Patrol"; and the spoof of the Barrymores, "The Royal Family of Broadway."
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1944: The first year since the 1930-31 Oscars that the academy had just five nominees, "Going My Way" won the best picture Oscar, beating fellow nominees "Double Indemnity," "Gaslight," "Since You Went Away" and "Wilson."
