Lincoln leads Oscars nods with 12

Steven Spielberg's Civil War saga Lincoln leads the Academy Awards with 12 nominations.

The film will compete for Oscars including best picture, best director, and acting accolades for stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.

It is Day-Lewis' fifth nomination for best actor and a win at the ceremony on February 24th would give him a hat-trick, as he won previously in 1989 for My Left Foot and in 2007 for There Will be Blood.

Also among the nine nominees for best picture are Ben Affleck's Iran hostage thriller Argo; the old-age love story Amour; the independent hit Beasts of the Southern Wild; Quentin Tarantino's 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 thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

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 an alcoholic 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.

Riva, 85, is the oldest actress ever to be nominated for the award and nine-year-old Wallis is the youngest ever nominee in that category.

Along with Field, supporting-actress nominees are Amy Adams as a cult leader's devoted wife in The Master; Anne Hathaway tragic heroine Fantine in Les Miserables; Helen Hunt as a sex surrogate in The Sessions; and Australian-born 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.

And all-conquering pop megastar Adele has been nominated for her Bond theme Skyfall. The nomination for best original song puts her up against Oscars host Seth MacFarlane, who is nominated for Everybody Needs A Best Friend from his film Ted.