For the first time in ten years, Oscar’s Best Picture winner was a foregone conclusion.

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, his most serious film to date, a true story about the Holocaust featuring a coda with real life survivors of Auschwitz, was a highly acclaimed work that swept all the precursors.  The only question was what the other nominees would be.

The Golden Globes seemed to give a pretty good indication with the nominations of Martin Scorsese’s film of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father about the Irish “troubles”; Jane Campion’s New Zealand set and filmed The Piano and James Ivory’s butler’s eye view of World War II, The Remains of the Day.

Also in contention were Andrew Davis’ popular The Fugitive based on the old TV series; Robert Altman’s latest multi-character opus, Short Cuts from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver; Wayne Wang’s look at Chinese-American life, The Joy Luck Club from Amy Tan’s popular novel and Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, the first major film dealing with AIDS.  Further down the list, but still within the realm of possibility were Wolfgang Petersen’s tense, exciting In the Line of Fire about an attempted presidential assassination; Peter Weir’s Fearless about the traumas suffered by survivors of a plane crash; Lasse Hallstrom’s poignant coming of age drama, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and two highly regarded Asian films, Kaige Chen’s operatic Farewell My Concubine from Hong Kong and Ang Lee’s comedy, The Wedding Banquet, set in Manhattan but officially from Taiwan with most of its dialogue in Chinese.

The Directors Guild echoed the Globes’ list of nominated directors: Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List); Jane Campion (The Piano); James Ivory (The Remains of the Day); Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence) and Andrew Davis (The Fugitive).  Oscar agreed with just three: Spielberg, Campion and Ivory, choosing Robert Altman (Short Cuts) and Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father) over Scorsese and Davis.

This was the second year in succession in which Altman was nominated for Best Director while his film was left out of Best Picture race.  The Fugitive was the nominated film without a Best Director nominee, where it joined Schindler’s List; The Piano; The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father.

What, then, would the other nominees have been had Oscar gone to a ten Best Picture slate this year?

Certainly the list would have included The Age of Innocence with its five nominations and one win.  Also likely would have been Philadelphia (five nominations, two wins including Best Actor Tom Hanks) and In the Line of Fire (three nominations, no wins).  Less likely, but still possible, would have been Short Cuts (one nomination, no win) and The Joy Luck Club (no nominations).   Farewell My Concubine and The Wedding Banquet would most likely have had to do with their Best Foreign Film nominations plus a screenplay nod for Concubine.   What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Fearless would most likely have had to settle for the supporting acting nods that went to Leonardo DiCaprio and Rosie Perez, respectively.