10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees You Might Not Have Heard Of

8. Heaven Can Wait

Year: 1978 Fellow Nominees: The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Midnight Express, An Unmarried Woman Coming in a year when the Best Picture lineup featured a couple of pretty rarely mentioned films (An Unmarried Woman also nearly made this list), Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait, which he stars in and co-directs with Buck Henry (co-screenwriter of The Graduate), was nominated for a hefty nine Academy Awards (inc. Best Director, Actor, Screenplay), winning one for Art Direction. Beatty, who was often nominated in multiple categories for the same film (see: Reds, which won him Best Director in 1982), stars here as a quarterback for the LA Rams who is accidentally taken from his body (by an overzealous angel) before he was meant to die. He returns to life in the body of a recently murdered millionaire. Co-starring James Mason and Julie Christie, the film, a remake of a 1941 Robert Montgomery comedy called Here Comes Mr. Jordan, was never likely to win Best Picture, an award that was always going to go to one of the two Vietnam pictures nominated alongside it (in hindsight, only three years after the Vietnam War ended, and only two after the Academy refused to acknowledge Taxi Driver, it's a pleasant surprise that The Deer Hunter won here - a rare progressive move on the Academy's part).