The Academy Award nominations were announced bright and early Thursday morning -- timing that made it difficult for a wage slave like myself to provide them to you instantly, but did afford me with a nice interval in which to think about them from 35,000 feet up. In the coming weeks I'll have more in-depth analysis, and I'll get to the complete nominations in a second, but, since you've probably already seen a full list at some point today, here are some of my initial thoughts on them first. • Big is back, at least this year. OK, sure, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Amour, films with little broad commercial appeal, are among the Best Picture nominees, but the rest are big in some way. They might not be blockbusters on the order of The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers, but there are big stars, big directors and big commercial successes up and down the ballot. Five of the nominees -- Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, Les Miserables and Life of Pi -- were among the top 35 earners at the box office in 2012. Zero Dark Thirty, which also could be a big success at the box office, opens nationwide this week, so it's possible two-thirds of the nominees could be seen by many, many casual fans before Oscar night. That's a far cry from 2011 when The Help was the only nominee among the top 35 earners. Whether this means the Academy voters are more in touch with the average moviegoer or the average moviegoer has a better palate, this seems like a positive development.

• Speaking of Beasts of the Southern Wild, it is the surprise darling of the nominations. It wasn't even a foregone conclusion that the little indie film that could would be nominated for Best Picture at all, but there it is. And there Quvenzhane Wallis -- aka Hushpuppy -- is among the Best Actress nominees -- another stunner, especially since she is the youngest nominee in the history of the category. Benh Zeitlin also pipped both Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained) and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) for a Best Directing nomination, perhaps the biggest surprise of all.

• Speaking of Beasts of the Southern Wild again, how did it not get a nomination for Best Original Score? The music by Dan Romer and Zeitlin was brilliant.

• The Academy's perception of The Master perfectly aligns with mine. Of director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, I wrote that "the parts of [it] feel just a little greater than its sum." I was referring to the incredible performances by the actors in it and this nagging feeling that there wasn't much of a coherent point beneath the virtuoso displays from the likes of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams. All three of them received award nominations, but The Master was shut out of the Best Picture category.

• The Best Actor race is over before it started. Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as our 16th president in Lincoln is as much a slam dunk as I can recall in the last few years. This says a great deal about him as an actor, not just because he was so terrific, but because in any other year Phoenix's turn as Freddie Quell in The Master would be nearly as much of a foregone conclusion.

• Go down ballot on Best Supporting Actress. Consider this my first, of likely many, pleas to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the nominations sink in further. I'm severely underwhelmed by the nominees in this category. I could live with Adams (The Master) winning the award, but the idea of either Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables) or Sally Field (Lincoln) taking it for their histrionic-filled performances this year is bothersome. Me? I'm pulling for Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook).

• The absences are noticeable to a glaring degree in the Best Director category. Zeitlin's nomination is a major surprise, but so is Haneke's -- albeit to a lesser degree -- when you consider that their inclusion left Bigelow, Tarantino and Ben Affleck (Argo) on the outside looking in. Partially because I'm so happy for Zeitlin and I haven't yet seen Amour, I'm not all that worked up about who is missing. Mostly, though, it doesn't bother me because there's nothing tangible with which to judge this category for a total Hollywood outsider. How, exactly, am I supposed to know if Tarantino directed the shit out Django Unchained compared to Ang Lee's work on Life of Pi other than by simply judging the movie as a whole, which is already the purpose of the Best Picture category?

• Less noticeable, but still glaring, are the absences in the Best Supporting actor category. I'm glad to see Christoph Waltz nominated for playing Dr. King Schultz in Django, but at least one, if not both, of Leonardo DiCaprio or Samuel L. Jackson should have joined him in getting nominated in this category. Jackson was particularly excellent, I thought, and Alan Arkin (Argo), Robert De Niro (Silver Linings Playbook) and Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln) could have all been bumped.

• Finally, Best Picture seems fairly wide open, doesn't it? Before the nominees were announced, I saw this boiling down to a three-horse race between Zero Dark Thirty, Argo and Lincoln, with a slight edge to the former of the three films. The fact that neither Bigelow nor Affleck were nominated for Best Director turns that logic on its head (since Best Picture and Best Director often go hand in hand), and would seem to make Lincoln the odds-on favorite to take home the top prize and sweep up a number of awards. But this is a brave new world we're living in where more than five films can be nominated for Best Picture, so I'm not sure how reliable that line of logic really is anymore. Sure, you have to like Lincoln to win and win big at this stage, but I'm not taking it to the bank exactly. Take note of Silver Linings Playbook as well, which has to be emerging as a darkhorse candidate with director David O. Russell's nomination in the bellwether Directing category.