Silently ‘The Artist’ and ‘Hugo’ lead Oscars

It's been almost as many years as there've been Academy Awards since a silent film was nominated for best picture. And here comes The Artist, making a lot of noise.

A just-about-entirely silent film (in black and white, no less), the homage to old Hollywood received 10 nominations, including best picture, best actor, and best director, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees for the 84th Academy Awards this morning in Beverly Hills.

In all, nine films are vying for the best picture prize. The Artist's competition: The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese's effects-driven 3-D tribute to - yes - the silent era, led the pack with 11 nominations, including one for Scorsese's direction, but it failed to score recognition for its cast. (With a procedural change to the nominating rules instituted in June, it's possible to have anywhere from five to 10 best picture nominees, determined by a percentage of the 6,000-plus members' first place votes.)

The Help, the Southern-fried story of black domestics and their white employers at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, received three acting nods: Viola Davis, for best actress, and Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer for actress in a supporting role.

Joining Davis in the highly competitive lead actress category: Meryl Streep, for her decades-spanning portrait of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (it's her 17th Oscar nomination, and she hasn't won since 1983); Michelle Williams, who channeled mid-century sex bomb Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn; Glenn Close, for the title role - a woman masquerading as a man - in Albert Nobbs, and newcomer Rooney Mara, for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Mara's nomination was perhaps the most surprising, bumping Charlize Theron (for Young Adult) and Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) out of the running.

In the best-actor race, George Clooney (also a nominee in the adapted screenplay category, for The Ides of March) is far and away the front runner, recognized for his turn in The Descendants, as a family man struggling to reconnect with his daughters as his wife lies in a coma. Clooney's best bud Brad Pitt was nominated for his portrait of real-life Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, in Moneyball. The other nominees: French man Jean Dujardin, as the Silent Era star struggling to transition to talkies in The Artist; Gary Oldman, as the taciturn British MI6 man George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Demián Bichir, who portrays an undocumented Mexican gardener in East L.A. in A Better Life. A beautiful performance in a little-seen film, Bichir's slot turned Leonardo Dicaprio (J. Edgar) and Ryan Gosling (The Ides of March) into no-gos.

In the supporting actor race, legendary veterans Christopher Plummer (Beginners) and Max von Sydow (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close) are on the list along with Kenneth Branagh (as Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn), Jonah Hill (as a nerdy sports statistican in Moneyball) and Nick Nolte, who played an alcoholic wrestling coach and estranged dad in Warrior.

In addition to the two nominees from The Help, the supporting actress candidates are Berenice Bejo as the ascending starlet in The Artist, Melissa McCarthy as the gross-out gal-pal in Bridesmaids, and Janet McTeer for another gender-bending turn in Albert Nobbs.

And in addition to Scorsese for Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist, the best director nominees are Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris, Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life and Alexander Payne for The Descendants.

In the best animated feature race, three popular studio productions - Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots and Rango will be duking it out against a two virtually unnoticed 'toons: A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita.

The 84th Acacemy Awards will be broadcast Sunday, Feb. 26, at 7pm on ABC. Billy Crystal is set to host.