And the Oscar nominations go to. . .

By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Say this for the past. It refuses to stay there. This morning’s announcement of the 84th Academy Award nominations put Martin Scorsese’s vibrant film-history lesson and train-station adventure, “Hugo,” atop a nine-movie best-picture field with 11 nods. Right behind it, with 10, was “The Artist,” a light, black-and-white comedy, about a silent-film actor fretting at the dawn of talking movies. The movie is itself almost totally silent.

“The Help,” a very popular dramatic comedy focused on black maids and their white employers in 1960s Mississippi, received four. Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” in which a stalled screenwriter’s travels back to Jazz-Age Paris also received four.

At least six of this year’s nine best picture nominees comfortably reside in decades before our own. Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which scored three nominations, is set, in part, many millennia before 2012, and Steven Spielberg’s old-Hollywood epic, “War Horse,” which received six nominations, about a steed in the trenches during World War I. And three of the acting nominations went to performers playing, respectively, Marilyn Monroe, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Margaret Thatcher: Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, and Meryl Streep.

The other picture nominees include: “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne’s comedy about the domestic stress of a land baron (it received five nominations overall); Bennett Miller’s baseball-management study, “Moneyball” (six nominations); and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” in which a boy looks for a lock to fit a mysterious key after his father perishes in the September 11th attacks.

So now is a good time to ask, “Why nine, as opposed to five or 10.” Last summer, the Academy’s board of governors introduced a new nominating system, which uses a version of preferential voting that eliminates from consideration any film that failed to appear as the number-one choice on at least 10 percent of members’ ballots. There are just around 5,000 voting members of the Academy, which means that at least nearly 500 voters would have had to put, say, “Bridesmaids,” in the first slot on their ballot, which didn’t happen.

That film, a big hit, did earn an original screenplay nomination and, in a small surprise, a best-supporting actress nomination for Melissa McCarthy. Her competition includes Bérénice Bejo, who plays an ingenue-turned-star in “The Artist”; Jessica Chastain, as a ditzy newlywed in “The Help”; Janet McTeer, as a woman disguised as a man in Albert Nobbs; and Octavia Spencer, who shares half of Chastain’s scenes as her cook and housekeeper in “The Help.”

In the best actress category, Streep earned her 17th nomination, in “The Iron Lady.” She’s joined by Viola Davis, who plays a dolorous and conscientious maid in “The Help” and Williams, who dismantles Marilyn Monroe’s persona in “My Week with Marilyn. These women were widely seen as sure bets for a nomination. But in a refreshing change of pace from the many years in which this category seemed to suffer from drought, the remaining two spots were considered open to a small field of four or five women. One slot went to Glenn Close, who spent years laboring to make “Albert Nobbs,” a drama about an Irishwoman working as a butler in 19th-century Dublin. Rooney Mara took the other, for her role as the oft-abused, highly vengeful, perversely moral genius goth-hack in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

The actor’s race had, in some circles, been called the Sexiest Man Alive Referendum, with the pack being led by George Clooney, for his performance as a dysfunctional father in “The Descendants,” and Brad Pitt, who plays the stoic general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team in “Moneyball.” They’re joined by Jean Dujardin, who plays the silent-film star of “The Artist” and a couple of curveballs. Demian Bechir was nominated for his dignified performance as an illegal-immigrant in “A Better Life,” a drama that few people have seen but that has touched those who have. And Gary Oldman scored his first nomination, for his work as an aging espionage agent in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

The supporting actor race includes Branagh, who plays an exasperated Olivier in “My Week with Marilyn”; Jonah Hill, as a dry-as-toast numbers analyst in “Moneyball”; Christopher Plummer, whose performance as a gay father dying of cancer in “Beginners” has a been winning other awards; Max von Sydow, as a young boy’s speechless sidekick in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” The surprises in this category are the inclusion of Nick Nolte’s alcoholic fight trainer in “Warrior” and the omission of Albert Brooks’s deadly gangster in “Drive.”

Allen earned his seventh directing nomination for “Midnight in Paris” (and his 15th screenwriting nomination). He’s the most nominated writer ever. His fellow directing nominees are Michel Hazanvicius for “The Artist,” Malick for “The Tree of Life,” Payne for “The Descendants,” and Scorsese for “Hugo.”

In keeping with themes of nostalgia, however incidentally, Billy Crystal, a host of Oscars past, has been asked to return to oversee the February 26th broadcast, which will air on ABC.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @wesley_morris.