10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees You Might Not Have Heard Of

4. Mississippi Burning

Year: 1988

Fellow Nominees: The Accidental Tourist, Rain Man, Dangerous Liaisons, Working Girl

Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning is the first instance on this list of a film that really should've taken home the Best Picture statuette.

Starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as a pair of FBI agents sent to investigate the disappearance of some civil rights activists in the still deeply segregated titular state, Parker's film is both a masterwork of American crime fiction and a damning indictment of the country's racist past, which isn't the past at all when you consider that the film is set less than thirty years before, in 1964. As Roger Ebert said: "The Academy loves to honor prestigious movies in which long-ago crimes are rectified in far-away places. Here is a nominee with the ink still wet on its pages."

Honoured it wasn't, though, and of the film's seven Oscar nominations (inc. Best Director, and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Gene Hackman) it won only one, for Peter Biziou's stunning cinematography. In a year when the other four nominees were all solid if unremarkable films, Mississippi Burning should've won at a canter.