The 85th Annual Academy Awards are set for Feb. 24. Seth MacFarlane, who helped announce the nominations, and picked up an Original Song nod for his contribution to Ted, is the host.
Close behind was fellow Best Picture nominee “Life of Pi,” Ang Lee’s mystical fable of a young man stranded on a ship’s lifeboat with a voracious Bengal tiger, which received 11 nominations.
“Lincoln,” Steven Spielberg’s drama of the 16th president’s fight to eradicate slavery, leads the race for this year’s Academy Awards, with 12 nominations, including Best Picture.
Joining them in the Best Picture category are: “Les Miserables,” an adaptation of the stage musical of love and vengeance in France against a backdrop of revolution, which earned 8 nominations total; “Argo” (winner of seven nominations), in which a CIA operative tries to evacuate Americans trapped in Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis by pretending to be a film crew, based on a true story; and “Zero Dark Thirty” (five nominations), an account of the hunt and ultimate killing of terror leader Osama bin Laden.
Also nominated: “Amour,” Michael Haneke’s intimate portrayal of an aged couple grappling with illness and the specter of loss, a top-prize winner at Cannes and the European Film Awards; “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a Sundance favorite that uses magical realism to evoke a child’s world in the Louisiana bayou; “Django Unchained,” Quentin Tarantino’s violent tale of bounty hunters and slaveowners; and “Silver Linings Playbook,” a comedy-drama of a man released from a mental institution, probably prematurely, which received eight nominations in all.