Beverly Hills: The Civil War saga Lincoln leads the Academy Awards with 12 nominations, including best picture, director for Steven Spielberg and acting honours for British-born Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.
Oscar winners will be announced February 24.
Life of Pi surprisingly ran second in nominations with 11, ahead of Zero Dark Thirty and Les Miserables, which had both been considered potential front-runners.
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 Miserables.
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 have three acting nominations for Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Two-time winner Spielberg earned his seventh directing nomination, and also in the mix are Taiwan-born 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: German-born Michael Haneke for his French-language Amour and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Amour also was a best-picture surprise. The Austrian film, which won the top prize at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, mainly had been considered a favourite in the foreign-language category, where it also was nominated. Amour had five nominations, including original screenplay and best actress for French-born Emmanuelle Riva.
The year’s second-biggest hit, The Dark Knight Rises, was shut out entirely, even for visual effects. The omission of its predecessor, The Dark Knight, from the best-picture category for 2008, was largely responsible for the expansion of the Oscar category from five nominees to 10 the following year.
The Dark Knight had earned eight nominations and won two Oscars.
Chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s final months as he engineers passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, Lincoln stars best-actor contender Day-Lewis in a monumental performance as the 16th president, supporting-actress nominee Field as the notoriously headstrong Mary Todd Lincoln and supporting-actor prospect Jones as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens.
