Best Picture
12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013)	American Hustle (2013)	Captain Phillips (2013)	Dallas Buyers Club (2013)	Gravity (2013)
Her (2013)	Nebraska (2013)	Philomena (2013)	The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Best Animated Feature Film
FROZEN (2013)	The Croods (2013)	Despicable Me 2 (2013)	Ernest & Celestine (2012, Fr./Belg./Lux.)	The Wind Rises (2013, Jp.)

Actor:
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHY in "Dallas Buyers Club," Christian Bale in "American Hustle," Bruce Dern in "Nebraska," Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street," Chiwetel Ejiofor in "12 Years a Slave"
Actress:
CATE BLANCHETT in "Blue Jasmine," Amy Adams in "American Hustle," Sandra Bullock in "Gravity," Judi Dench in "Philomena," Meryl Streep in "August: Osage County"
Supporting Actor:
JARED LETO in "Dallas Buyers Club, "Barkhad Abdi in "Captain Phillips," Bradley Cooper in "American Hustle," Michael Fassbender in "12 Years a Slave," Jonah Hill in "The Wolf of Wall Street"
Supporting Actress:
LUPITA NYONG'O in "12 Years a Slave," Sally Hawkins in "Blue Jasmine," Jennifer Lawrence in "American Hustle," Julia Roberts in "August: Osage County," June Squibb in "Nebraska"
Director:
ALFONSO CUARON for "Gravity," Steve McQueen for "12 Years a Slave," Alexander Payne for "Nebraska," David O. Russell for "American Hustle," Martin Scorsese for "The Wolf of Wall Street"

It must be noted that almost all of the most financially-successful (non-animated) films of the year, including The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Iron Man 3 (1 nom), Man of Steel, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (3 noms), Fast & Furious 6, Oz the Great and Powerful, Star Trek Into Darkness (1 nom), and Thor: The Dark World, were no-shows for a Best Picture nod, or for any Oscars. They also received a minor number of nominations (with no wins) in all of the other categories.

The 2013 Oscars race was one of the most heated and unpredictable in recent memory - with three films leading and facing off against all of the other contenders. According to Academy rules, nine films were the # 1 choice of at least 5 percent of Academy voters. Two-thirds (six) of the nine Best Picture nominees were based on true stories about real people and events. At the time of the awards, the nine films had earned a combined $790.7 million (domestic), much less when compared to a total gross of over $1 billion for last year's nine nominees.

The Best Picture winner was director Steve McQueen's modestly-budgeted 12 Years a Slave (with 9 nominations and three wins, also Best Adapted Screenplay by John Ridley and Best Supporting Actress). It was a gripping survival tale (and true story with a harrowing depiction of slavery) of freed black man/musician Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) from Sarasota, NY, who was kidnapped and sold into bondage in the 1840s (recounted in his 1853 memoir).

It marked the first time a film directed by a black filmmaker had won Best Picture, although McQueen did not win Best Director. It was also only the fifth highest-grossing film among the nine Best Picture nominees at only $50 million (domestic revenue). [Note: only 20 other Best Picture winners in Oscars history have claimed three or fewer Oscars (e.g., 12 with 3 Oscars, 5 with 2 Oscars, and 3 with only 1 Oscar). It matched the most recent Best Pictures Argo (2012) and Crash (2005) with only three total wins. And Ridley's scriptwriting win was only the second time the screenplay Oscar was given to a black writer. The first was Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious (2009).]

The film with the most wins was Gravity (with 10 nominations, and seven wins (mostly technical) including Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Director). Only one other Best Picture-nominated film has won more Oscar awards without winning Best Picture - Cabaret (1972) with 8 wins. Director and co-writer Alfonso Cuarón's and Warner Bros.' stunning drama and outer-space survival tale told about stranded astronauts (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney). [Note: It was the 6th film in Academy history released predominately in 3D to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also the 5th film in Oscar history to score Oscar nominations in all seven technical Oscar categories. It was by far the highest-grossing blockbuster film among the Best Picture nominees, and the only one among the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2013 - at # 6 - with $270.5 million (domestic) at the time of the awards.]

Two other Best Picture nominees and contenders (with Oscar wins) were:

• Dallas Buyers Club (with 6 nominations and three wins for Best Supporting Actor, Best Actor, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling), director Jean-Marc Vallee's intimate look at the AIDS crisis of the 1980s with its story about an unlikable guy who became a fierce AIDS crusader, by launching a buyers' club to provide AIDS patients with drugs unapproved or not yet sanctioned by the FDA.
• Her (with 5 nominations and one win: Best Original Screenplay by writer-director Spike Jonze, his first win from 4 career nominations), a near-future imaginative story of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a divorced lonely writer who fell in love with his OS's Siri-like Samantha (personified by the witty, throaty, and seductive voice of Scarlett Johansson).

In an upset, five of the nine Best Picture-nominated films won no Oscars at all:

• director and co-writer David O. Russell's and Sony's con-man crime drama-comedy (or dramedy) American Hustle (with 10 nominations and no wins). It joined two other films with the dubious distinction of being nominated 10 times without a single Oscar win (the other films were Gangs of New York (2002) and True Grit (2010). Only two other films, The Turning Point (1977) and The Color Purple (1985) have 11 nominations without wins). The story was set in 1978 and told about an actual FBI corruption sting (Abscam). Lying, sleazy con Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a schlubby Bronx swindler who was accompanied by his seductive girlfriend/British partner Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and his crazed, sexy and unhappily bitter wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), was lured (or forced) to work for beady-eyed, determined FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). [Note: American Hustle was only the 15th film to ever receive at least one Oscar nomination in each of the four acting categories. It was remarkable that this was the second Russell film to do so, and consecutively (previously, Silver Linings Playbook (2012) did the same).]
• Captain Phillips (with 6 nominations and no wins), director Paul Greengrass' recreation of the Somali hijackers' seizure of an American shipping freighter (US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama) off the Horn of Africa in April of 2009, with its subsequent stand-off between the working-class hero/captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) and the desperate lead pirate Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi).
• Nebraska (with 6 nominations and no wins), low-budget and filmed in black and white, an Americana road-trip tale of an aging, grumpy old curmudgeon named Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) chasing a dubious magazine sweepstakes prize of $1 million, accompanied by his adult son David (Will Forte).
• The Wolf of Wall Street (with 5 nominations and no wins), Martin Scorsese's three hour epic - a polarizing view of Wall Street and its hedonistic debauchery, personified by the rise and fall of charismatic financial trader-wizard Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), who wrote a 2007 memoir (and 2009 follow-up) about his stock-market scams. This film most resembled Scorsese's previous effort - the classic mobster film GoodFellas (1990).
  [Note: The obscenity-laced film was notable for having the most uses of the word "f--k" (by some counts 522 times) for an Oscar-nominated film - no other film, let alone Oscar-nominated film, has ever featured that many.]
• Philomena (with 4 nominations and no wins), Stephen Frears' heart-breaking true-life drama about elderly Irishwoman Philomena (Judi Dench) searching for a son she was forced to give up years earlier.

In the Best Director category, there were five nominees - all with Best Picture-nominated films, and only one with a previous Best Director win. The winner was 52 year-old Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (with his 4th career nomination, and his first Best Director win) for Gravity, a technically-superlative, realistic 3-D drama. He was the first Mexican-born director (or Latino) to win Best Director. [Note: Cuarón had three previous nominations: Best Original Screenplay for And Your Mother Too (Y Tu Mamá También) (2002), and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing for Children of Men (2006).]

The other Best Director nominees were:

• 44 year-old British director Steve McQueen (with his first Oscar nomination) for 12 Years a Slave, an unflinching, uncompromising, well-crafted film about a difficult time in US history, displaying the atrocities of slavery.
  [Note: After John Singleton and Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen became only the third black filmmaker to receive a Best Director nomination -- and the first of non-US origin. If McQueen had won Best Director, he would have become the first black filmmaker to win the title.]
• 71 year-old veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese (with his 8th Best Director nomination and 11th nomination overall), for The Wolf of Wall Street
  [Note: This was the fifth of Martin Scorsese's last six films to score nods for Best Picture and Director. Scorsese was previously nominated for Best Director for Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), GoodFellas (1990), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) (his sole win), and Hugo (2011).]
• 55 year-old David O. Russell (with his 4th career nomination and his 3rd Best Director nomination), for American Hustle.
  [Note: It was Russell's third Best Director Oscar nomination within a span of just four years. His two other directorial nominations were for The Fighter (2010) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) (with an additional nod for Best Adapted Screenplay for the latter). Russell joined the ranks of six other filmmakers who were nominated in back-to-back years for directing and writing: Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945)), David Lean (Brief Encounter (1946) and Great Expectations (1947)), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950)), John Huston (The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The African Queen (1951)), Richard Brooks (The Professionals (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967)), and Woody Allen (Annie Hall (1977) and Interiors (1978)).]
• 52 year-old Alexander Payne (with his 7th Oscar nomination in his career - and 3rd Best Director nomination), for the black and white road movie Nebraska.
  [Note: Payne was previously nominated in this category for Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011). He won twice for the same two films - Best Adapted Screenplay for Sideways (2004) and for The Descendants (2011), with an additional nod for the latter as Best Picture. He had another nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Election (1999).]

Regarding the Animated Feature Film category, the five nominees were some of the most profitable films of the year. The Oscar for this category was first awarded in 2002 (for films released in 2001). The winner this year was Frozen, from Walt Disney Animation Studios, the # 3 film at the year's box office (with $388.7 million (domestic revenue)). It was loosely based upon Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, about an ice princess. It also won its other Oscar nomination for Best Original Song ("Let It Go"). [Note: It was also the Golden Globes Award winner in this category, and it was Disney's biggest hit since The Lion King (1994). It was the first animated Disney soundtrack to hit Billboard's #1 album chart since Pocahontas (1995), and the first to maintain the top spot for multiple weeks since The Lion King (1994).]

The other four Animated Feature Film nominees were:

• Despicable Me 2, a blockbuster sequel, from Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures. It had $368 million (domestic revenue) - the # 4 film at the box office.
  [Note: In a first for the category, this sequel was nominated for Best Animated Feature while its predecessor was not.]
• The Croods, from DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, set among cavemen in a prehistoric time era. It had $187.2 million (domestic revenue) - the # 14 film at the 2013 box office.
• Ernest & Celestine, French-Belgian hand-drawn entry based on childrens' books by author/illustrator Gabrielle Vincent.
• The Wind Rises, a Japanese animated historical fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, his final film.
  [Note: the Japanese filmmaker now had the most nominations (three) in this category: also for Spirited Away (2002, Jp.) (win) and Howl's Moving Castle (2005, Jp.).]

The unnominated Pixar animation Monsters University was # 7 at the box-office with $268.5 million (domestic).

Italy solidified its position as the country with the most Best Foreign Language Film Oscars - a total of 11 Oscars and 3 Honorary or Special Awards. It was the winner this year for its entry The Great Beauty. [Note: Italy broke its own record for number of Best Foreign Language Film nominations with its 28th for The Great Beauty.]

There were eight first-time Oscar nominees out of twenty performers in the main acting categories, including three newbie performers from 12 Years a Slave. Only seven of the 20 acting nominees were previous Oscar winners (and only one of those seven was male - Christian Bale). Meryl Streep was the lone thespian with more than one Academy Award Oscar win (three total). [Note: Although there were three black performers contending for acting honors, none of them was African-American. Chiwetel Ejiofor was from England and with Nigerian parentage, Barkhad Abdi was born in Somalia and raised in Yemen, and winner Lupita Nyong'o was Kenyan.]

In the Best Actor category, the five nominees included lots of first-time Oscar nominees, and only one nominee with a previous Oscar win. The winner was a first-time Oscar recipient: 44 year-old Matthew McConaughey as homophobic, good-ol'-boy Dallas rodeor and electrician Ron Woodroof, who was diagnosed with HIV in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and began to smuggle experimental drugs, in Dallas Buyers Club.

The other Best Actor nominees were:

• 39 year-old Christian Bale (with his second Oscar nomination, and first in the Best Actor category) as clever Bronx swindler Irving Rosenfeld (the real-life Melvin Weinberg) who reluctantly partnered with the FBI for a sting operation (the real-life Abscam) against corrupt politicians, in American Hustle
  [Note: Bale previously won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Fighter (2010).]
• 77 year-old Bruce Dern (with his second Oscar nomination - after 35 years!) as grouchy old Woody Grant, who believed he had won a million dollars in a sweepstakes contest, in Nebraska
  [Note: Dern's only other previous nomination was Best Supporting Actor as a Vietnam vet for Coming Home (1978). If Dern won the Oscar this time around, he would be the oldest-ever Best Actor winner.]
• 39 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio (with his fourth Oscar nomination and 3rd Best Actor nom - with no wins) as fraudulent, hedonistic, unscrupulous, cocaine-addicted stock market manipulator Jordan Belfort, in The Wolf of Wall Street
  [Note: DiCaprio's previous nominations were Best Supporting Actor for What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993), and Best Actor for The Aviator (2004) and Blood Diamond (2006).]
• 36 year-old British-born Nigerian Chiwetel Ejiofor (with his first Oscar nomination), as Northern-born musician and free man Solomon Northup, who in 1841 was kidnapped and sold into slavery on a trip to Washington DC - and soon found himself as an emotionally-tormented and physically-abused slave for a dozen years, in 12 Years a Slave

In the Best Actress category, the five nominees were all old-timers with multiple nominations and awards - the five nominees had great Oscar success, with 38 nominations and 6 wins between them. (Amy Adams - the sole nominee in the category to be winless Oscar-wise, remained win-less.)

The winner was 44 year-old Australian actress Cate Blanchett (with her 6th Oscar nomination, since 1998 and second Oscar win) as self-obsessed, distraught, materialistic and disturbed New York socialite Jeanette "Jasmine" Francis (following her swindling husband's (Alex Baldwin) massive Wall Street high-finance Ponzi-scheme fraud), in San Francisco with her sister to rebuild her penniless and friendless life, in writer/director Woody Allen's dark drama Blue Jasmine (the film's sole win). Cate Blanchett became the first Australian actress to win two Oscars. [Note: Blanchett had previously won Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator (2004). She had two Best Actress noms for Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), and two supporting nominations for Notes on a Scandal (2006) and I'm Not There (2007).] She also became the sixth actor to win an Oscar for a Woody Allen film, following after Diane Keaton for Annie Hall (1977), Michael Caine for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Dianne Weist for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Mira Sorvino for Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

The other Best Actress nominees were:

• 64 year-old Meryl Streep (with her 18th nomination overall - a record) as 65 year-old acid-tongued, pill-popping, ascerbic matriarch Violet Weston, suffering from mouth cancer, in a dysfunctional Oklahoma family in August: Osage County, a big-screen adaptation of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning play
  [Note: Streep broke her own record. The actress has now racked up 15 Best Actress nominations (with two wins) and three supporting actress nominations (with one win). She remained the most nominated movie star in Academy history, with Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson trailing behind with twelve nominations each. Her three previous Oscar wins were Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), and Best Actress for Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011).]
• 79 year-old Judi Dench (with her 7th nomination, and 5th Best Actress nomination) as working-class Irish mother Philomena Lee, who enlisted the aid of journalist Martin Sixsmith (the film's co-writer and producer Steve Coogan) to help locate the son she (as a teenager) was forced to give up for adoption in 1950s' Ireland by an Irish convent when she became pregnant out of wedlock, in the drama Philomena
  [Note: Dench won Best Supporting Actress for Shakespeare in Love (1998), and was nominated for supporting actress for Chocolat (2000). Her other four nominations were all for Best Actress: Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown (1997), Iris (2001), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), and Notes on a Scandal (2006).]
• 39 year-old Amy Adams (with her 5th Oscar nomination in just nine years since 2005, and her first Best Actress nomination!) as determined and ruthless Sydney Prosser (aka Lady Edith Greensly?, the real-life Evelyn Knight), the sexy, Machiavellian glam-grifter with swift changes of identity and accent, in love with fellow fraudster Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), in American Hustle
  [Note: Adams' previous nominations, all for supporting actress, were for Junebug (2005), Doubt (2008), The Fighter (2010), and The Master (2012).]
• 49 year-old Sandra Bullock (with her 2nd Oscar nomination) as medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone on her first shuttle mission - who soon became a stranded, in-peril astronaut who summoned her strength to survive adrift in outer space, in Gravity
  [Note: Bullock previously won Best Actress for the sports drama The Blind Side (2009).]

In the Best Supporting Actor category, all of the nominees were experiencing their first or second nomination, and the oldest nominee was 42 years old. The nominees had just two previous nominations and no wins. The winner in the category was 42 year-old Jared Leto (with his first Oscar nomination and win) as the touching, charismatic and transformed transgender (or transvestite) prostitute Rayon, infected with HIV and dying of AIDS (who joined co-star Matthew McConaughey in a smuggling operation for experimental AIDS drugs), in Dallas Buyers Club.

The other Best Supporting Actor nominees were:

• 39 year-old Bradley Cooper (with his second Oscar nomination) as ambitiously-manic, vain FBI agent Richie DiMaso who was working with two con-artists in crime (co-stars Amy Adams and Christian Bale) to bring down corrupt politicians, in American Hustle
  [Note: Cooper's previous nomination was Best Actor for Silver Linings Playbook (2012).]
• 30 year-old Jonah Hill (with his second supporting Oscar nomination) as toothy, creepy, and sleazy financial henchman Donnie Azoff for Wall Street swindling stockbroker Jordan Belfort (co-star Leonardo DiCaprio), in The Wolf of Wall Street
  [Note: Hill's previous nomination was Best Supporting Actor for Moneyball (2011).]
• 28 year-old Somali Barkhad Abdi (with his first Oscar nomination, and in his film debut), as desperate and menacing hostage-taker Abduwali Muse, a Somali pirate, in Captain Phillips.
  [Note: Abdi was a real-life Somali-refugee, and the first Somali actor to ever receive an Oscar nomination.]
• 36 year-old Irish-German Michael Fassbender (with his first Oscar nomination) as the unforgettably sadistic, Bible-pounding, inhumane, alcoholic and self-pitying slave master and Southern plantation owner Edwin Epps, in 12 Years a Slave

In the Best Supporting Actress category, there were three first-time nominees, one of whom was the winner in her feature film debut -- 30 year-old Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o (born in Mexico), who portrayed the spirited field slave Patsey, mercilessly-abused, mistreated, and trapped by her angry and lustful slavemaster Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), in 12 Years a Slave. Nyong'o was only the 9th actress in Academy history who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a debut performance (in a feature film) - with a substantial film role. She also became the sixth African-American (or black) actress to have won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The other four Best Supporting Actress nominees were:

• 46 year-old Julia Roberts (with her 4th career Oscar nomination) as strong-willed, judgmental, and angry oldest daughter Barbara Weston-Fordham, in August: Osage County
  [Note: Roberts received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Steel Magnolias (1989), and two Best Actress nominations: for Pretty Woman (1990), and Erin Brockovich (2000) - her sole Oscar win.]
• 23 year-old Jennifer Lawrence (with her 3rd career Oscar nomination) as the crazy-sexy, boozy bitter wife Rosalyn Rosenfeld, married to sleazy con Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), and threatening to jeopardize the entire FBI sting operation, in American Hustle
  [Note: Lawrence was previously nominated twice for Best Actress for Winter's Bone (2010) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) - her first win. With this nomination, Lawrence became the youngest three-time acting nominee of all-time, breaking a record previously held by Teresa Wright (who was 24 when she received her third nomination in 1942).
  [Note: If Lawrence had won this year, she'd make Academy Awards history as the youngest woman ever to have two Academy Awards. The current record is held by Luise Rainer, who at 26 years of age won for The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and won the next year for The Good Earth (1937)). Lawrence would have also become the third actress to win consecutive Oscars (and the sixth performer to win back-to-back acting Oscars). The last actress to do so was acting legend Katharine Hepburn in the late 1960s, with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968), and previously, it was Rainer. Only five actors have won Academy Awards back to back - the last was Tom Hanks for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994).]
• 37 year-old English actress Sally Hawkins (with her first Oscar nomination) as mentally-unstable and disgraced Jasmine's working class sister Ginger, in Blue Jasmine
• 84 year-old June Squibb (a theater actress, with her first Oscar nomination) as Kate Grant - the sharp-tongued, frustrated and uninhibited housewife of aging Woody (Bruce Dern), in Nebraska
  [Note: Squibb was the second oldest Best Supporting Actress nominee ever, at the age of 84 years and 71 days. If Squibb had won, she'd be the oldest Oscar-winning performer.]

Notable this year was the fact that composer John Williams received his 49th career nomination (Best Original Score for The Book Thief). He had a total of five wins and more Oscar nominations than any other living person, and second only to Walt Disney (with 59) for most Oscar nominations ever.

Also, Woody Allen broke his own record with his 16th Best Original Screenplay nomination for Blue Jasmine. Allen has won the Oscar in this category three times: for Annie Hall (1977), for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and for Midnight in Paris (2011). Allen was the oldest winner of the award, at 76 for his 2011 film.

Most Obvious Omissions or Snubs:

Best Picture: Left out of the top race were August: Osage County (with only two nominations - Streep's and Roberts' noms), the Coen Brothers' tale of a struggling folk musician (Oscar Isaac) in 1961's Greenwich Village Inside Llewyn Davis (with only two minor nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Mixing), Lee Daniels' The Butler (with no nominations) - a multi-decade story of black White House butler Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) who served eight US Presidents, and most surprisingly, Saving Mr. Banks (which only received one nomination for Best Original Score), about the making of the movie Mary Poppins. [Also, the Harvey Weinstein-produced biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, starring Idris Elba and Naomie Harris, earned only a single nomination for U2's Best Original Song entry Ordinary Love.] And Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (with three significant nominations and one win) was not included as the 10th nominee (for Best Picture) or nominated for Best Director. The Great Gatsby, the winner of two Oscars (for its sole nominations: Best Production Design and Best Costume Design), was conspicuously missing as well.

Best Director: Director Paul Greengrass did not receive a nomination for Best Picture-nominated Captain Phillips, nor did visionary writer/director Spike Jonze for his innovative view of the near future in the sci-fi romance Her, or first-time director Ryan Coogler for Fruitvale Station.

Best Actor: Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks was snubbed as the fiercely determined title character in the you-are-there thriller Captain Phillips, and as the supporting character Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks. 77 year-old Robert Redford, with a powerful non-verbal performance, was denied a nomination for his harrowing role as a stranded sailboater in the middle of the Indian Ocean in J.C. Chandor's survival drama All Is Lost. [Note: Redford's sole previous acting nod was for The Sting (1973), about 40 years earlier. All is Lost received only one nomination for Sound Editing.] Also, the Best Picture-nominated Her was lacking a nomination for its divorcee protagonist-nerd (Joaquin Phoenix) in virtual love.

Best Actress: Emma Thompson was denied a nomination as fussy author P.L. Travers (with novel Mary Poppins) in John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr. Banks, as was Brie Larson for her role as foster care worker Grace in Short Term 12. Two other missing nominees: French actress Adele Exarchopoulos for the controversially sexy French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, and Julie Delpy as Celine in the third film in Richard Linklater's trilogy, Before Midnight.

Best Supporting Actor: The late departed James Gandolfini was not nominated for the comedy Enough Said. And Scarlett Johansson was not nominated for her voice-only role as the throaty, seductive and intelligent Siri-like OS system's Samantha in Her.

Best Supporting Actress: Early top contender Oprah Winfrey missed out on a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as boozy truth-telling servant's wife Gloria Gaines in Lee Daniels' The Butler. It was her first major film role since Beloved (1998). And Octavia Spencer was overlooked for her subtle, heartbreaking portrayal of Wanda, the mother of the slain unarmed 22-year old African-American Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) on New Years' Day in 2009, in Fruitvale Station (with no nominations).

Best Animated Feature Film: Pixar released 11 films since 2001 that were eligible for the Animated Feature Film award. Of them, only two failed to garner a nomination - the sequel Cars 2 (2011) and this year's prequel Monsters University.