!With this year's ceremony just days away, The A.V. Club has singled out 90 important, terrific, even canonical movies that weren't nominated—one for every Best Picture lineup going back to the beginning. We've followed the Academy's rules about what qualifies, which mainly means only selecting movies that opened in the United States during each year's eligibility window, including foreign-language films that took a minute to make it to America. Most years, you could program a film festival from the list of viable alternative candidates and snubbed triumphs, so consider this a kind of parallel cinematic history—a much different window into a century of movies than the one the Academy has opened. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but you'd have to be legally blind to ignore most of these films, especially given what often made the cut instead."
