La La Land, the candy-coloured love letter to movie musicals, has landed a record-equalling 14 Academy Awards nominations, matching the record jointly held by Titanic (1997) and All About Eve (1950).
It earned Oscar nods for Best Picture, for its stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, its songs and 32-year-old writer-director, Damien Chazelle.
The other nominees for Best Picture are: Moonlight, Arrival, Manchester by the Sea, Hell or High Water, Lion, Fences, Hidden Figures and Hacksaw Ridge.
Following two years of "#OscarsSoWhite" controversy, the Academy of Motion Pictures unveiled a noticeably more diverse list of nominees, led by Barry Jenkins' luminous coming-of-age drama Moonlight, as well as Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington, and Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures.
Moonlight and Denis Villeneuve's cerebral science fiction thriller Arrival tied for the second-highest number of nominations, with eight each.
The biggest surprise, perhaps, was the strong support for Mel Gibson, shunned in Hollywood for the past decade. Not only did his World War Two drama Hacksaw Ridge land a Best Picture nod, but Gibson scored an unexpected Best Director nomination.
The nominees for Best Actor are: Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea), Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge), Ryan Gosling (La La Land), Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic) and Denzel Washington (Fences).
In the running for best supporting actor are: Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals), Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea) and Dev Patel (Lion).
Fairly or not, this year’s nominations were being closely watched as a test for the revamped film academy. These are the first Oscars voted on since academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs ushered in new membership rules and added 683 new members in an attempt to diversify what was a predominantly white, male and elderly group. The membership now numbers 6,687.
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The full list: Oscar nominations 2017
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The Oscars also rejigged its nominations format. Instead of announcing the nominees live in Los Angeles, pre-recorded videos of previous winners introduced each category.
This year's group of Best Picture nominees is one of the lowest grossing. Though La La Land and some other nominees, including Arrival and (less certainly) Hidden Figures are close to earning US$100 million (Dh367m) at the North American box office, none of them has yet broken through that barrier.
After an unlikely awards season run, tongue-in-cheek superhero movie Deadpool (which made $363.1m in North America) failed to crash the Oscars party.
The regular blockbuster business of corporate-driven Hollywood is increasingly set apart from the awards season, where smaller, critically adored films such as 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, Boyhood and Spotlight have dominated in recent years.
Only one major studio – Paramount, which distributed Arrival and Fences – scored a best picture nomination.
Amazon landed its first Best Picture nomination, for Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea, for which the streaming service partnered with Roadside Attractions to distribute.
The dearth of blockbuster nominees will be a test for host Jimmy Kimmel, who will present the Academy Awards for the first time on February 26.
While the ceremony is still one of the most-watched TV broadcasts of the year, ratings have been in decline the past two years. Last year’s ceremony, hosted by Chris Rock, attracted 34.4 million viewers, an eight-year-low. That show, which he introduced as “the White People’s Choice Awards”, was at the heart of Hollywood’s diversity debate.
This year’s ceremony – where politics seems likely to feature prominently – will surely be seen as an improvement. But many have long held that the industry’s inclusivity problems are rooted not in its award shows, but in its power brokers: the executives, agents and producers.
* Associated Press
