I no longer offer up predictions of the Oscar nominees, but I can tell you with some assurance that I definitely wouldn’t have seen that Best Director list coming. While there are all sorts of interesting details up and down the list of nominees for the 85th Academy Awards, it’s the five guys cited for directing that stand as the most interesting story from the morning’s announcement. And “guys” is a word that I use very deliberately. After becoming only the fourth woman to be nominated in that category and the first to win, Kathryn Bigelow failed to make the cut as expected for Zero Dark Thirty, which could more easily be attributed to sexism if not for the fact that the film itself did so poorly across the board, picking up a meager five nods. Instead, it seems that the controversies surrounding the film may have dissuaded Academy voters. Regardless, talk that this year’s Best Picture race might boil down to a clash between recent and distant history is probably done. Though Life of Pi had an impressive eleven nominations, including a Best Director citation for Ang Lee, it’s hard to see how Lincoln, the most honored film with twelve nods, doesn’t walk away with this.

That clang of jaws dropping in the Zero Dark Thirty camp this morning also suggests that the acting race previously thought of as the most competitive suddenly got a whole lot clearer. Jessica Chastain probably now gets to beam and adorably burrow her face into the shoulder of whoever she brings with before applauding for someone else, and that person is almost assuredly Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook. It was noted from the nominating stage this morning that the Best Actress category includes both the category’s oldest (Emmanuelle Riva) and youngest (Quvenzhané Wallis) nominee ever. Assuming Lawrence winds up winning, she’ll also become one of the youngest Best Actress honorees ever. She’ll be 22 years old, the same age as Janet Gaynor (who won long ago enough that rules allowed her to be honored for three different films) and a year younger than current record-holder Marlee Matlin.

Sticking with Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell also got his first significant nomination of the Oscars season, after being overlooked by both the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild. Given that the film comes from the Weinstein Company, it is fresh evidence that what Harvey wants Harvey gets when it comes to the Academy Awards. This year’s clearest evidence that Weinstein and his people are better than anyone else at playing this Oscar game is that Silver Linings Playbook landed a nominee in each of the four acting categories, a feat that hasn’t happened since 1981’s Reds.

I never would have predicted Benh Zeitlin’s well-deserved nomination for directing Beast of the Southern Wild, but I might have sussed out the love accorded Michael Haneke for Amour. The director’s branch of the Academy has an admirable history of celebrating at least one out-of-the-box auteur every year, usually someone with a very singular vision, which is why Julian Schnabel, Fernando Meirelles and Pedro Almodóvar can put Best Director nominee of their respective resumes. I’ve no doubt that Amour wouldn’t have gotten a corresponding Best Picture nomination without the expanded slate (nine this year), but it still becomes the first foreign language film to make the cut since Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006 (which was helped immeasurably in Academy stature by being an American production directed by that most American of Americans Clint Eastwood) and the first actually directed by a foreign director since 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That was directed, of course, by Ang Lee. And thus we’ve come full circle.

A couple other observations:

–The Best Supporting Actor race is guaranteed to produce a repeat winner as all five men nominated have already won Oscars. I’m not sure there’s ever been a category of all winners before. If I were betting today, I’d say Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln, mostly because it seems the safest choice. It’s tempting to predict Robert De Niro for Silver Linings Playbook, but that would make him a three-time winner, and that seems a more likely outcome that night for Best Actor nominee Daniel Day-Lewis, who’s absolutely amazing in Lincoln. This is a very exclusive club, with only five other performers who can claim to have won a third acting trophy (Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman, four-time winner Katharine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep). I suspect it’s going to hard enough for the Academy to pull the trigger on one more addition to that club just a year after Streep finally made it there. If two different people make it to a third win, it’ll be a truly momentous night.

–Speaking of third Oscar wins…well, technically Spielberg has more than two Oscar, having won for producing Schindler’s List and also, I believe, standing as the person who gets to keep the Best Animated Feature trophy won last year by The Adventures of Tintin. Still, Spielberg has a very good chance to join William Wyler and Frank Capra as a three-time winner in the Best Director category (John Ford won it four times). Last year I noted that Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen both slipped past Spielberg on the list of total career nominations in the category. He moves back up to join them, each man having earned seven nomination, tying them with David Lean and Fred Zinnemann. Billy Wilder is next on the list with eight nominations.

–John Williams was nominated in the Best Score category for his work on Spielberg’s Lincoln. It is his forty-eighth Academy Award nomination. Astounding.

–There was a time when the Best Documentary Feature nominees represented the most distant films on the entire Academy list, the stuff I hadn’t seen and had no realistic expectations that I would be able to see them. This year, I’ve reviewed three of the film honorees for Spectrum Culture.

—The Simpsons snagged an Oscar nomination!

–Usually the nomination announcement is a dry, rushed affair with some celebrity joining the Academy president to race through the categories. This year they opted to put pending Oscar host Seth MacFarlane up there, along with Emma Stone, presumably to continue to boost his profile ahead of the awards. If the dumb jokes he came up with for this morning are any indication–and they undoubtedly are–then we’re in for an especially brutal Oscarcast. I already suspected that, but grim expectations were amazingly lowered.

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