Oil Patch Potboiler "There Will Be Blood" & Cohen Bros.' "No Country for Old Men" Lead Oscar Parade with 8 Nominations Each; Keira Knightley & James McAvoy of "Atonement" Shut Out

Dateline: Beverly Hills, California, January 22, 2008.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced the Oscar nominations for the best of cinema in 2007 at its Beverly Hills headquarters today. There Will Be Blood, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of muckraker Sinclair Lewis' 1927 novel Oil led the field with eight nominations, matched by Joel & Ethan Cohen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Oscar-winner George Clooney's socially conscious Michael Clayton racked up seven nominations, including a Best Actor nod for its star.

There Will Be Blood features an old-fashioned, scenery-chewing bravura performance by Oscar-winner (and 2008 Best Actor nominee) Daniel Day-Lewis.

Joel & Ethan Cohen, the brotherly duo who made the classic film Fargo, tied an Academy record by receiving four nominations each from one film. The brothers were nominated as Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay and again for Best Film Editing under their pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. They also received nods kudos as producers of No Country for Old Men. The record of four nominations was first set by Warren Beatty in 1979, with Heaven Can Wait, and equalled by Beatty himself three years later with his epic Reds.

The Oscar-winning songwriting duo of Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz got three nods for the songs from Walt Disney's Enchanted. "Happy Working Song," "So Close," and "That's How You Know" all featured music by Menken and lyrics by Schwartz

The great surprise of this year's Oscar season is the lack of acting nominations for the two leads of the highly praised British film Atonement, which was nominated as Best Picture. Both Keira Knightley and her co-star James McAvoy were shut-out of acting honors, as was the film's director, Joe Wright. The omission of Knightley, who had been nominated for Best Actress in 2006 for Pride and Prejudice, was particularly startling as the actress seems to be on the verge of super-stardom.