Lincoln leads Oscars with 12 nominations

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.

Also among the nine nominees for best picture on 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 Miserables; the shipwreck story Life of Pi; the lost-souls romance Silver Linings Playbook; and the Osama bin Laden manhunt chronicle Zero Dark Thirty.

Oscar winners will be announced on 24 February in Los Angeles.

Best actress and actor

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.

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; Australian-born Hugh Jackman as Victor Hugo's tragic hero Jean Valjean in Les Miserables; Joaquin 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; French-born Emmanuelle 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 British-born Naomi Watts as a mother caught up in a devastating tsunami in The Impossible.

Complex formula of ballots

Along with Field, supporting-actress nominees are Amy Adams as a cult leader's devoted wife in The Master; Anne Hathaway as an outcast mother reduced to prostitution in Les Miserables; Helen Hunt as a sex surrogate in The Sessions; and Jacki Weaver as an unstable man's doting mom in Silver Linings Playbook.

Besides Jones, the supporting-actor contenders are Alan Arkin as a wily Hollywood producer in Argo; Robert De Niro as a football-obsessed patriarch in Silver Linings Playbook; Philip Seymour Hoffman as a dynamic cult leader in The Master; and Austrian-born Christoph Waltz as a genteel bounty hunter in Django Unchained.

The Oscars feature a best-picture field that ranges from five to 10 films depending on a complex formula of ballots from the 5 856 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is the Oscar host.