LOS ANGELES – A chaotic Oscar race found some order on Tuesday, as “The Artist,” a mostly silent tribute to old Hollywood, and “Hugo,” another bit of film nostalgia, edged to the fore. They were joined by “The Descendants,” about life and love in Hawaii, and “Midnight in Paris,” about literary Paris, in scoring an array of major nominations, including those for best picture, best director and best original or adapted screenplay.

The nine nominees for best picture also included “The Help,” about race relations; “War Horse,” about a fighting horse; “Moneyball,” about the business side of baseball; and two surprises, “The Tree of Life” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” As the muddy awards picture cleared, a host of erstwhile contenders finally fell away, in the race for best picture at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 26.

The also-rans included Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” which was shut out; George Clooney’s “Ides of March,” with only a screenwriting nomination; and a half-dozen others that were shaken out by a tough round of Hollywood guild awards and a revised Oscar balloting system.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, after experimenting for two years with 10 best-picture nominees, established a sliding scale this year, with new procedures engineered to reward a significant core of No. 1 votes, rather than a host of votes for second or third. The surprise was that the field stretched to nine of a possible 10. Oscar watchers had predicted that the new counting method would yield a smaller figure.

By the numbers, this year’s most heavily nominated contenders are “Hugo” with 11, followed closely by “The Artist” with 10. “Moneyball” and “War Horse” each have six nominations, while “The Descendants,” though strong in the acting, writing and directing categories, has only five, and “Midnight in Paris” just four, though all in top categories that point toward best-picture potential.

In fact, a large stack of nominations can sometimes be the Academy’s way of acknowledging a very good film that hasn’t really won its heart.

Last year, “True Grit” had 10 nominations, including best picture, and ranked just below “The King’s Speech,” the eventual winner, but took home nothing on Oscar night. “The Aviator” and “Brokeback Mountain” were the most heavily nominated films in their years but weren’t winners.

The biggest surprise in the group was almost surely “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” a drama revolving around the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The film had been snubbed in one after another of the pre-Oscar awards, though its backers, including the producer Scott Rudin, insisted that a devoted core of admirers might turn the film, directed by Stephen Daldry, into a best picture contender.

In a seeming disconnect, only one best actress nominee, Viola Davis of “The Help,” appeared in a film nominated for best picture. Other nominees in the category were Glenn Close, for playing a woman who plays a man in “Albert Nobbs”; Meryl Streep, as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, both in and past her prime, in “The Iron Lady”; Rooney Mara, as the damaged soul and computer hacker in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; and Michelle Williams, as Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn.”

Streep’s nomination cemented her position as the most-nominated actor in Academy Awards history, with 17 nominations – far more than Jack Nicholson and Katharine Hepburn, with 12 each. Streep last won an Oscar in 1983, as best actress for “Sophie’s Choice.”

Among the best actor nominees, Clooney (“The Descendants”), Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”) and Brad Pitt (“Moneyball”) appeared in films receiving a best-picture nod. Demian Bichir, who played an illegal immigrant gardener in “A Better Life,” and Gary Oldman, a spy hunter in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” were also nominated.

Oldman, who has never been nominated for an Oscar in a long acting career, said, “I can’t think of a better role to be nominated with than my man George Smiley.”

Snubs on the actors list included Leonardo DiCaprio for “J. Edgar,” and Michael Fassbender for “Shame.” Both films sizzled into the season amid supercharged publicity, but wound up with no nominations in the major categories.

Similarly, “Bridesmaids,” a popular favorite whose cast of female comics was nominated for an ensemble award from the Screen Actors Guild, fell flat with just two major nominations: Melissa McCarthy, for best supporting actress, and Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo for best original screenplay.

Other supporting actress nominations went to Berenice Bejo for “The Artist”; Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer, both for “The Help”; and Janet McTeer for “Albert Nobbs.”

Supporting actor nominees were Kenneth Branagh for “My Week With Marilyn”; Nick Nolte for “Warrior”; Jonah Hill for “Moneyball”; Christopher Plummer for “Beginners”; and Max von Sydow for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

Conventional wisdom among Hollywood’s Oscar campaigners says the nominations for best director help to identify the real contenders for best picture, by culling out movies whose filmmakers did not quite make the cut. By that standard, “The Help,” a vastly popular film with Oscar-friendly themes — about racial bias and conciliation — has a problem, as its director, the relative newcomer Tate Taylor, was snubbed. So was Steven Spielberg, as the director of “War Horse.”

Instead, the directing nominations went to Michel Hazanavicius for “The Artist”; Alexander Payne for “The Descendants”; Woody Allen for “Midnight in Paris”; and Martin Scorsese for “Hugo,” along with Terrence Malick for “The Tree of Life.” Only Hazanavicius has not previously been nominated in the category.

Scorsese, named best director in 2007 for “The Departed,” had perhaps the warmest reception of anyone at the Golden Globes this month, receiving an award for directing “Hugo” to an outpouring of applause that revealed him as someone beloved and admired here. (One weakness: “Hugo” had no acting nominations.)

The three nominations for “The Tree of Life” – for cinematography, best picture and director – are notable recognitions for Malick and a film that is more out of the mainstream than the other contenders.

Tuesday’s nominations included a rare rebuff of Pixar and its chief creative officer, John Lasseter. “Cars 2,” which Lasseter directed, was not among the animation nominees, which in the past have been dominated by Pixar films like “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E” and “The Incredibles.”

Its rival DreamWorks Animation had two animated nominees, “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Puss in Boots.” Also nominated were “Rango,” from Paramount Pictures, and “A Cat in Paris” and “Chico & Rita,” both from abroad.

As usual, none of the foreign-language nominees has yet found a wide audience in the United States. The nominees are “Bullhead,” from Belgium; “Footnote,” from Israel; “In Darkness,” from Poland; Monsieur Lazhar,” from Canada; and “A Separation,” from Iran. “Footnote,” “In Darkness” and “A Separation” are all backed in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics, one of the few domestic distributors that still focuses on subtitled films.

The year’s documentary selections, “Hell and Back Again,” “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” “Pina” and “Undefeated,” are the last under an old set of rules that allowed very small groups within the Academy’s 157-member documentary branch to filter their choices through the selection process. The category will now be open to wider input, and may lean toward choices that have been more widely seen.

Among companies, a big winner was Sony Pictures, which had 21 nominations for films from both its major studio and its Sony Pictures Classics art-house division.

Both Paramount and the Weinstein Co. had more than a dozen nominations each, and Disney had 11 nominations, including those for “War Horse” and “The Help,” which were made by its affiliate, DreamWorks.

While nine of the top 10 films at the domestic box office last year were sequels, an unprecedented occurrence, only a handful made an impression on the Academy. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the year’s best-selling film, with more than $1.3 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was nominated only for its art direction, makeup and visual effects, despite an aggressive billboard and radio campaign here.

The Academy’s challenge this year is to win over viewers who have not yet warmed to the movies that will be on display when the ceremony is broadcast on ABC. Among the best picture nominees, only “The Help” has crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office. (It amassed almost $170 million in North American ticket sales and just $36 million elsewhere.)

If the movies lack drawing power, the Oscar host, Billy Crystal, is known for having presided over some of the Academy’s most-viewed ceremonies, including a 1998 show. That one ran an epic 3 hours 47 minutes, but drew a record 57.3 million viewers. Last year’s ceremony, with James Franco and Anne Hathaway, and more than 30 minutes shorter, drew only about 37.6 million viewers.