‘Lincoln’ leads with 12 Oscar nominations

The American Civil War saga Lincoln leads the Academy Awards with 12 nominations, including best picture, director for Steven Spielberg and acting honours for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones.

Also among the nine nominees for best picture: Old-age love story Amour; Iran hostage thriller Argo; independent hit Beasts of the Southern Wild; slave-revenge narrative Django Unchained; the musical Les Misérables; shipwreck story Life of Pi; lost-souls romance Silver Linings Playbook; and the Osama bin Laden manhunt chronicle Zero Dark Thirty.

Harvey Weinstein produced two of the nine best picture nominees — Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook — and was naturally pleased.

“I am blown away. I can’t say thank you enough to the Academy for their support of our films,” he said.

Life of Pi surprisingly ran second with 11 nominations, ahead of Zero Dark Thirty and Les Misérables.

More surprising were snubs in the directing category, where three favourites missed out: Ben Affleck for Argo and past Oscar winners Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Tom Hooper for Les Misérables.

The best picture category also had surprising omissions. The acclaimed first-love tale Moonrise Kingdom was left out and only got one nomination, for original screenplay. Also snubbed for best picture was The Master, a critical favourite that did manage three acting nods for Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Two-time winner Spielberg earned his seventh directing nomination, and also in the mix are past winner Ang Lee for Life of Pi and past nominee David O Russell for Silver Linings Playbook. The other slots went to surprise picks who are first-time nominees: Michael Haneke for his French-language Amour and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Amour also was a best-picture surprise. The film, which won the top prize at May’s Cannes Film Festival, mainly had been considered a favourite in the foreign-language category.

The year’s second-biggest box-office hit, The Dark Knight Rises, was shut out entirely, even for visual effects.

Chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s final months as he engineered passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, Lincoln stars best actor contender Day-Lewis in a monumental performance as the 16th US president, supporting actress nominee Field as the headstrong Mary Todd Lincoln, and supporting actor prospect Jones as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens.

Joining Day-Lewis in the best actor field are Bradley Cooper as a psychiatric patient trying to get his life back together in Silver Linings Playbook; Hugh Jackman as Victor Hugo’s tragic hero Jean Valjean in Les Misérables; Phoenix as a navy vet who falls in with a cult in The Master; and Denzel Washington as a boozy pilot in Flight.

Nominated for best actress are Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative in Zero Dark Thirty; Jennifer Lawrence as a troubled young widow struggling to heal in Silver Linings Playbook; Emmanuel Riva as an ailing woman tended by her husband in Amour; Quvenzhane Wallis as a spirited girl on the Louisiana delta in Beasts of the Southern Wild; and Naomi Watts as a mother caught up in a devastating tsunami in The Impossible.

Best actress had a wild age range: Riva is the oldest nominee ever in the category at 85, while Wallis is the youngest ever at 9.

Along with Field, supporting actress nominees are Adams as a cult leader’s devoted wife in The Master; Anne Hathaway as an outcast mother reduced to prostitution in Les Misérables; Helen Hunt as a sex surrogate in The Sessions; and Jacki Weaver as an unstable man’s doting mother in Silver Linings Playbook.

Besides Jones, the supporting actor contenders are Alan Arkin as a wily Hollywood producer in Argo; Robert De Niro as a football-obsessed patriarch in Silver Linings Playbook; Hoffman as a dynamic cult leader in The Master; and Christoph Waltz as a genteel bounty hunter in Django Unchained.

Lincoln is Spielberg’s best awards prospect since his critical peak in the 1990s, when he won best picture and directing Oscars for Schindler’s List and a second directing Oscar for Saving Private Ryan.

Spielberg’s latest film could vault him, Day-Lewis and Field to new heights among Hollywood’s super-elite of multiple Oscar winners.

Winners for the 85th Oscars will be announced Feb 24 at a ceremony aired from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.

Laughs and wariness

* Oscars host Seth MacFarlane may already have organisers nervous after giving a taste of jokes to come as the nominees were announced.

The Family Guy writer elicited some laughs and some wariness.

MacFarlane made jokes about actresses having sex with film producer Harvey Weinstein and the relationship between Amour, a quiet movie about a dying woman, and Hitler.

“Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein,” he said after announcing the nominees in the supporting actress category. There were laughs, and audible groans.

After he and actress Emma Stone unveiled the foreign language film nominees, MacFarlane said: “I read Amour was co-produced in Austria and Germany, right? The last time Austria got together and co-produced something it was Hitler, but this is much better.”