Lincoln leads Oscars with 12 nominations
Spielberg matches nods he received for Schindler’s List
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — Steven Spielberg has matched his personal best at the Academy Awards: 12 nominations for his Civil War saga Lincoln, including best picture, director and acting honours for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.
That ties the 12 nominations for his 1993 drama Schindler’s List, which won seven Oscars, including best picture and director.
Also among the nine nominees for best picture Thursday: the old-age love story Amour; the Iran hostage thriller Argo; the independent hit Beasts of the Southern Wild; the slave-revenge narrative Django Unchained; the musical Les Misérables; the shipwreck story Life of Pi; the lost-souls romance Silver Linings Playbook; and the Osama bin Laden manhunt chronicle Zero Dark Thirty.
Life of Pi surprisingly ran second with 11 nominations, ahead of Zero Dark Thirty and Les Misérables, which had been considered potential front-runners.
“I thought we’d get a few, so this is really great for us,” said Life of Pi director Ang Lee. “Eleven really surprised me. But it’s a good surprise. I’m very happily surprised.”
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 Misérables. Bigelow was the first woman ever to win the directing Oscar, in 2009 for The Hurt Locker, while Hooper won a year later for The King’s Speech.
The best-picture category also had surprising omissions. The acclaimed firstlove 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 manage 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 past winner 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: Michael Haneke for his French-language Amour and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Oscar directing contenders often are identical or at least usually line up closely with those for the Directors Guild of America Awards. But only Spielberg and Lee made both lists this time. The guild also nominated Affleck, Bigelow and Hooper, but not Haneke, Russell or Zeitlin.
Haneke’s Amour also was a best-picture surprise. The 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 Emmanuelle Riva.
The year’s second-biggest box-office hit, The Dark Knight Rises, was shut out entirely, even for visual effects.
Chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s final months as he engineers passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, Lincoln stars bestactor contender Day-Lewis in a monumental performance as the 16th U.S. president, supporting-actress nominee Field as the notoriously headstrong Mary Todd Lincoln and supporting-actor prospect Jones as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens.
Joining Day-Lewis in the best-actor field are Bradley Cooper as a psychiatric patient trying to get his life back together in Silver Linings Playbook; Hugh Jackman as Victor Hugo’s tragic hero Jean Valjean in Les Misérables; Phoenix as a navy vet who falls in with a cult in The Master; and Denzel Washington as a boozy airline pilot in Flight.
Nominated for best actress are Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative hunting bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty; Jennifer Lawrence as a troubled young widow struggling to heal in Silver Linings Playbook; Riva as an ailing woman tended by her husband in Amour; Quvenzhane Wallis as a spirited girl on the Louisiana delta in Beasts of the Southern Wild; and Naomi Watts as a mother caught up in a devastating tsunami in The Impossible.
Winners for the 85th Oscars will be announced Feb. 24 at a ceremony aired on ABC from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.