Four days to go! By the end of this weekend, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will name a new Best Picture, which will be the 87th film to win the award.

The Best Picture Oscar is not only considered the top prize from the Academy, but among the most important awards in film history. If a film wins, it goes down in the record books. And even if a film doesn’t win, it will still be among the over 500 films that have been nominated for Best Picture.

Of course, many great films lost the award and many more were never even nominated. Some of the most revered filmmakers of all time - including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman and countless great foreign directors - never helmed a Best Picture winner. And the names of directors who helmed multiple Best Picture winners will surprise even the biggest movie fans.

William Wyler directed three (Ben-Hur, Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years Of Our Lives). Fred Zinnemann made two (From Here To Eternity and A Man For All Seasons), as did Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend and The Apartment). Robert Wise, who is best known for his sci-fi/horror movies, helmed two beloved musical Best Picture winners (West Side Story and The Sound of Music).

The Best Picture prize also goes to the producer, so that means some surprising people have Oscars. Brad Pitt received an Oscar for 12 Years A slave. And even though he didn’t get nominated for directing it, Ben Affleck still won an Oscar for producing Argo.

The other issue with the Best Picture category is that only nine foreign films have ever been nominated for the award. Only 12 of them were financed outside of the U.S. and 11 of these were U.K. productions. The 12th movie is The Artist, a nearly silent movie financed by French producers.

Now that we got some boring history out of the way, let’s take a look at 10 Best Picture nominees you may have missed. The list is in chronological order.

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11