Irish gang up on Oscars

IRISH actor Daniel Day-Lewis and U2 are among the nominees for this year’s Oscars.

Chicago, the musical adapted from the stage hit about two murderous women competing for tabloid celebrity, has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including best picture.

Daniel Day-Lewis, who starred as a ruthlessly charming crime boss in the 1860s vengeance epic Gangs of New York which received 10 nominations has been nominated in the Best Actor category.

U2 have been nominated in the best original song category for a piece they penned for Gangs of New York.

Day-Lewis will be competing with Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Nicolas Cage (Adaptation), Michael Caine (The Quiet American) and Jack Nicholson

(About Schmidt). Other best picture nominees for the 75th annual Oscars were Gangs of New York, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Pianist.

Besides best picture, Chicago scored nominations for lead actress Renee Zellweger, supporting actresses Queen Latifah and Catherine Zeta-Jones and supporting actor John C Reilly.

In Chicago, Zellweger plays a stage wannabe jailed for killing her lover. Zeta-Jones co-stars as her conniving jailhouse rival. Queen Latifah plays an opportunistic warden, and Reilly is Zellweger's cuckolded husband.

Julianne Moore earned two acting nominations: best actress for the 1950s melodrama Far From Heaven, as a woman whose marriage disintegrates after her husband begins an affair with another man, and supporting actress as a despondent housewife in The Hours.

Along with Moore and Zellweger, best actress nominees were Salma Hayek as Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo in Frida; Nicole Kidman as author Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Diane Lane as an adulterous wife in Unfaithful.

Meryl Streep was shut out for a best actress nomination in The Hours, but did earn a supporting-actress nomination for the twisted Hollywood tale Adaptation.

Streep's nomination puts her in the record books as most-nominated actor ever. She had been tied with Katharine Hepburn at 12 nominations each; Streep now has 13.

Gangs of New York trailed Chicago with 10 nominations, including for director Martin Scorsese. The Hours was next with nine nominations, among them a supporting actor honour for Ed Harris as a writer dying of AIDS and best director for Stephen Daldry.

The Lord of the Rings franchise, whose first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, grabbed 13 nominations last year, this time it received just six. Other than best picture, the nominations for Two Towers were all in technical categories.

A surprise directing nominee was Pedro Almodovar for the Spanish-language movie Talk to Her.

Another best director nominee was Roman Polanski for The Pianist Charlie Kaufman, a previous screenwriting nominee for Being John Malkovich, scored a first of sorts.

He was nominated for adapted screenplay for Adaptation, along with fictional twin brother Donald, who shares the writing credit.

It was the first nomination ever for a fictional entity.

In the past, filmmakers have received nominations under assumed names, such as Joel and Ethan Coen as Roderick Jaynes, their film-editing pseudonym, or Robert Towne, who shared a screenwriting nomination for 1984's Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes under the name of his sheepdog, PH Vazak.

The Oscars take place on March 23 at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre.