With 1943 the last time until 2009 that the Academy allowed more than five films to qualify for Best Picture, the nominees get less interesting: few Grand Illusions or Wizard of Ozes would trouble the Academy’s record of recognizing elaborate butter cookies for the next four decades. The so-called woman’s picture, condescended to by male critics for too long, dominated the war years. Greer Garson starred in many of them. The British MGM star, forgotten now by many moviegoers, enjoyed five consecutive nominations in pictures like Madame Curie and Mrs. Miniver which acknowledged her strength but whose scripts and direction had no idea how to harness it, how to complement it. To my eyes, Mildred Pierce looks better and better with each screening — intelligently photographed, especially in its use of depth of field — at least against Michael Curtiz’s own Casablanca. And to deny the power of William Wyler’s Bette Davis pictures like The Letter and The Little Foxes must mean you don’t like motion pictures.
Speaking of letting shibboleths die, we don’t have to pretend How Green Was My Valley wasn’t a better than average Best Picture nominee; it just happened to come out the same year as The Greatest Film of All Time.
The Hague
Wilson
Gentleman’s Agreement
Kitty Foyle
Blossoms in the Dust
The Razor’s Edge
Mrs. Miniver
Hold Back the Dawn
Madame Curie
Meh
The Snake Pit
Wake Island
The Bishop’s Wife
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Suspicion
Going My Way
All This and Heaven Too
The Lost Weekend
Battleground
Kings Row
Watch on the Rhine
Heaven Can Wait
The Song of Bernadette
Anchors Aweigh
Spellbound
Sergeant York
Sound, Solid Entertainments
A Letter to Three Wives
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Foreign Correspondent
The Ox-Bow Incident
Twelve O’Clock High
The Talk of the Town
49th Parallel
Gaslight
Hamlet
The More The Merrier
Great Expectations
The Grapes of Wrath
The Snake Pit
In Which We Serve
The Great Dictator
Since You’ve Been Gone
Miracle on 34th Street
Johnny Belinda
The Philadelphia Story
The Pride of the Yannkees
Crossfire
The Long Voyage Home
The Bells of St. Mary
Good to Great
Citizen Kane
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Heiress
How Green Was My Valley
The Red Shoes
The Maltese Falcon
Double Indemnity
Rebecca
Mildred Pierce
Casablanca
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Letter
The Jury’s Out
The Pied Piper
Our Town
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
One Foot in Heaven
Humanizing The Vacuum 