Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Lincoln heads the list of nominations for this year’s Oscars, to be presented on February 25 (NZ time).
Lincoln, which releases in New Zealand on January 31 with several others in Oscar contention (Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty), led the Academy Award pack with 12 nominations.
Apart from Best Picture, they include Best Director (Steven Spielberg), Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Best Supporting Actress (Sally Field).
Ang Lee’s visually spectacular Life of Pi, based on the novel by Yann Martell, received nominations for Best Director and Best Picture.
Other films receiving nominations were Silver Linings Playbook, including Best Director (David O Russell), Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence) and Beasts of the Southern Wild, including Best Director (Benh Zeitlin), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress (Quvenzhané Wallis).
There were some surprises in the announcement.
In the Best Director category, 30-year-old Zeitlin was nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild, as was Michael Haneke for Amour, while Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), Ben Affleck (Argo), Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) and Tom Hooper (Les Miserables) did not receive nominations.
In the Best Song category, Taylor Swift didn’t receive a nomination for The Hunger Games.
New Zealand's only nominee, Sir Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, picked up nominations for makeup and hairstyling (Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane) against Hitchcock and Les Misérables; Production Design (Dan Hennah) and Set Decoration (Ra Vincent and Simon Bright) against four other nominees; and Visual Effects (Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R Christopher White), also against four other nominees.