No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood led with eight Academy Awards nominations each on Tuesday, among them best picture and acting honours for Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem - but it remained in doubt whether any stars would cross striking writers' picket lines to attend the ceremony.
No Country for Old Men, a crime saga about a drug deal gone bad, and There Will Be Blood, a historical epic set in California's oil boom years, will compete for best picture against the melancholy romance Atonement, the pregnancy comedy Juno and the legal drama Michael Clayton.
Atonement and Michael Clayton trailed with seven nominations each, including best actor for George Clooney in the title role of Clayton.
The lead players in Atonement, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, were shut out on nominations, however, with teenager Saoirse Ronin the only performer nominated for that film, for supporting actress.
Past Oscar winner Cate Blanchett had two nominations as best actress for the historical pageant Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and as supporting actress for the Bob Dylan tale I'm Not There.
The acting categories generally played out as expected - with a few surprises, including best actress nominee Laura Linney for The Savages and best-actor nominee Tommy Lee Jones for In the Valley of Elah. Neither performance had been high on the awards radar so far this Oscar season.
Best actress looks like a two-person duel between Julie Christie, an Oscar winner for Darling, as a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's in Away From Her and Marion Cotillard as singer Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose.
Both won Golden Globes, Christie for dramatic actress, Cotillard for musical or comedy actress. Yet they face strong competition from Blanchett, Linney and relative newcomer Ellen Page as a whip-smart pregnant teen in Juno.
Flamboyant
Day-Lewis, an Oscar winner for My Left Foot, grabbed another best-actor nomination as a flamboyant oil baron in There Will Be Blood, for which he could emerge as the favorite.
Along with Day-Lewis, Clooney, Mortenson and Jones, the other nominee was Johnny Depp, who won the Globe for musical or comedy actor as the vengeful barber in Sweeney Todd.
With a Golden Globe and universal acclaim for his performance as a relentless killer, Bardem looks like the closest thing to a front-runner this Oscar season, which is unusually wide open for best picture and other top categories.
Bardem is up against Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War; Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild; Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton.
The wide-open awards season had left the field up in question, and some other notable prospects were shut out, including past Oscar winner Angelina Jolie for A Mighty Heart, Helen Bonham Carter for Sweeney Todd, and Emile Hirsch for Into the Wild.
Sean Penn also missed out on a directing nod for Into the Wild, as did Eddie Vedder, who was shut out in music categories.
Also left out of the Oscars completely was the hit musical Hairspray. The fairy-tale comedy Enchanted had three of the five best song nominations.
Michael Moore - who castigated President Bush over the Iraq War in his best-documentary acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine in 2003 - is back in Oscar contention with his health-care documentary Sicko.
War-on-terror documentaries dominated the category, with Sicko up against No End in Sight, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience and Taxi to the Dark Side.
On strike since November 5, the Writers Guild of America refused to let its members work on the Golden Globes, which prompted stars to avoid the show in solidarity.
Globe organisers were forced to scrap their glitzy telecast and instead announce winners in a swift, humdrum news conference, without anyone on hand to accept the prizes.
