Fellini, another film master, never won a merit directorial Oscar despite four nominations: La Dolce Vita, 81/2, Satyricon, and Amarcord. Fellini was older (forty-two) than his American peers at his first nomination and, like other foreigners, had not been nominated for his earlier masterworks, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, though both films had won the Best Foreign-Language Picture in 1956 and 1957, respectively. Fellini later received an Honorary Oscar in 1993, which was basically a compensatory gesture.

Marcleoo Mastroianni failed to be nominated for his great performances in "Dolce Vita" and "81/2," though some of these movies were nominated–and even won–other awards. Mastroianni earned his first Best Actor nomination in 1962, at age thirty-eight, for the "Italian comedy, Divorce"–Italian Style, in which he excelled as the bored Sicilian baron who plans to get rid of his nagging wife.

The best chances for foreign artists to get nominations are in the two writing categories: Original Screenplay and Adapted Screenplay. The Swiss film, Leopold Lintberg's "Marie-Louise," about a group of French children during World War II, was the first European (and foreign-language) movie to win the Original Screenplay, though 1945 was an admittedly weak year for writing achievements.

Over the past 30 years, more than half of the Oscar-winning cameramen (yes, they are all men) have been foreign, including: Pasqualino De Santis (Romeo and Juliet), Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It).

In 1959, the five Best Picture nominees were: the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, the historical epic Ben-Hur, which won, the Holocaust drama The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story, and the British-made Room at the Top.