Chadwick Boseman - who died of cancer in August - has been nominated for Best Actor for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a movie which came out on Netflix.
Boseman, 43, played Levee Green, a temperamental but talented trumpet player, Levee Green, in the ensemble film about Ma Rainey, a jazz and blues performer, in the United States before the First World War.
Boseman will be the favourite to get the Best Actor award but he is up against Anthony Hopkins for The Father, Riz Ahmed for Sound of Metal, Gary Oldman for Mank and Steven Yeun for Minari.
The Oscar nominations for Best Film included Mank, Nomadland and The Trial of the Chicago 7, which tells the tale of seven anti-Vietnam war protesters who were put on trial on the orders of President Richard Nixon’s attorney general in 1969 after clashes at the Democratic Party convention in the Windy City.
The nominees for Best Actress were Carey Mulligan for Promising Young Woman, Frances McDormand for Nomadland, Vanessa Kirby for Pieces of a Woman, Viola Davis for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
Director David Fincher's Mank, a drama about 1940s Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, got the most Oscar nominations overall, with 10.
The Oscars will be handed out in Hollywood on 25 April and six films got six nominations apiece - The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland, Minari, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7.
British comedy actor Sacha Baron Cohen has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as protest leader Abbie Hoffman.
The other nominees were Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah, Leslie Odom Jr. for One Night in Miami, Paul Raci for Sound of Metal and LaKeith Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah.
The nominees for the best supporting actress Oscar included Maria Bakalova for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, also starring Baron Cohen. In the film Bakalova shared a controversial scene with Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
The other nominees were Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy, Olivia Colman in The Father, Amanda Seyfried in Mank and Yuh-Jung Youn in Minari.