BEVERLY HILLS - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the epic fantasy based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, captured the brass ring Tuesday morning with a leading 13 nominations for the 74th annual Academy Awards.

Besides literature, Academy voters showed an interest in math and music, awarding eight nominations each to A Beautiful Mind and Moulin Rouge, including best picture. The English murder mystery Gosford Park and the domestic family in turmoil drama In the Bedroom round out the nominees for the top prize.

A Beautiful Mind, the story of a math genius struggling with schizophrenia, emerged as an early favorite in the Oscar derby, with a first-time nod for director Ron Howard, actor Russell Crowe (last year’s winner for Gladiator) and supporting actress Jennifer Connelly.

During the past few decades, voters with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have shied away from both fantasy adventures and musicals for best picture, which could prove troublesome for Lord of the Rings and Baz Luhrmann’s offbeat Moulin Rouge. Movies like Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, All That Jazz and Beauty and the Beast have been nominated for best picture, but were unable to break through and win in the category.

The last musical to be named best picture was Oliver! in 1968.

The odds also are long for independent films Gosford Park, which picked up seven nominations but has failed to catch on with moviegoers, and In the Bedroom (five nominations), a surprising hit at the box office. Bedroom, which landed three acting nods (Tom Wilkinson for actor, Sissy Spacek for actress and Marisa Tomei for supporting actress), didn’t receive a nomination for first-time feature director Todd Field. Voters generally don’t fill in their Oscar ballots for best picture nominees that fail to land a bid for director and vice-versa (also making that a strike against Moulin Rouge).

Howard, the former child actor turned respected Hollywood director, is familiar with being in that position. His Apollo 13 rocketed to nine nominations in 1995, but Howard wasn’t among them, prompting screenwriter William Goldman to call him the least-recognized director of our time. (Braveheart won best picture and best director that year.)

Besides Howard, the other nominees for director are Ridley Scott (Black Hawk Down), Robert Altman (Gosford Park), Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive).

Jackson, in New Zealand working on the next Rings epic, The Two Towers, watched the nominations announcement at 2:30 a.m. local time (5:30 a.m. in Los Angeles).

‘‘We had a bunch of friends around and had a little party at our place,’’ Jackson said. ‘‘We just stayed up to wait for the moment.’’

In the acting categories, Russell Crowe set himself up to be the first back-to-back winner for best actor since Tom Hanks in 1993-94. Already, he’s the first actor to receive three consecutive bids in the category since William Hurt in the mid-1980s.

Besides Crowe and Wilkinson, the other nominees are first-timer Will Smith (Ali); Sean Penn (I Am Sam), who has two other Oscar bids on his resume; and Denzel Washington (Training Day), a five-time nominee who won in 1989 for his supporting role in Glory.

For best actress, Spacek, who garnered her sixth nomination (she won in 1980 for Coal Miner’s Daughter), is joined by veteran Judi Dench (Iris), a supporting actress winner for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love; and first-timers Halle Berry (Monster’s Ball), Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge) and Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary).

Berry joins a small group of 15 other black or Latino actresses nominated for acting. The last ones were Angela Bassett as Best Actress (What’s Love Got to Do With It) and Rosie Perez as Best Supporting Actress (Fearless) in 1993.

Another rarity in the category is Zellweger’s comic performance. ‘‘I’ve always thought of myself as a dramatic actress, because that’s where I started. Most of my work in the beginning was really in drama,’’ she said. ‘‘I can’t say it’s harder to do one or the other. The challenges are just different in comedy and drama.’’

The nominations also mark the first time three black actors were Oscar finalists in the lead categories since 1972, when Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson for Sounder and Diana Ross for Lady Sings the Blues were in the running.

For supporting actor, the contenders are Jim Broadbent (Iris), Ethan Hawke (Training Day), Ben Kingsley (Sexy Beast), Ian McKellen (Lord of the Rings) and Jon Voight (Ali).

It was the third nomination for Kingsley, an Oscar winner for Gandhi, in which he played one of history’s best-known pacifists, the diametric opposite of his vicious turn in Sexy Beast. Kingsley also was nominated for playing mobster Meyer Lansky in Bugsy.

‘‘I just have to thank my peers at the academy for being nominated for three very, very different performances,’’ Kingsley said. ‘‘Actors can be pushed into a corner in the types of roles they play. By those three nominations, I’ve been allowed to stay free and do work as a free man in my choices.’’

Competing for the supporting actress statuette are A Beautiful Mind’s Connelly and Tomei from In the Bedroom, Helen Mirren (Gosford Park), Maggie Smith (Gosford Park) and Kate Winslet (Iris).

In the new animated feature category, Disney’s Monsters, Inc. and Shrek from DreamWorks were both nominated, as had been widely predicted. They are joined by Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.

The 13 nominations received by Lord of the Rings (with many of them coming in the lower-profile categories such as art direction, cinematography, costume design, film editing, makeup, sound and visual effects), fell one short of the record held by 1950’s All About Eve and 1997’s Titanic, which had 14 mentions each. Both went on to capture best picture and wound up with six and 11 Oscars, respectively.

Other films with 13 nominations include Gone With the Wind (1939), Forrest Gump (1994) and Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Besides Field and Luhrmann, other notables missing from the list of nominees include Gene Hackman, a Golden Globe winner for The Royal Tenenbaums, and Billy Bob Thornton, a double Golden Globe nominee (The Man Who Wasn’t There and Bandits) and who also received praise for Monster’s Ball.

ABC will broadcast the Oscar ceremony on March 24 live from the show’s new Hollywood home at the Kodak Theatre, a block away from the Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Academy Awards were handed out in 1929.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

OSCAR FUN FACTS

Interesting tidbits from Tuesday’s 74th annual Oscar nominations:

• Russell Crowe’s nomination for his leading role in A Beautiful Mind is his third consecutive nomination in that category and follows his win last year for Gladiator. If he wins again this year, he will join five other actors with the same back-to-back achievement: Luise Rainer, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards and Tom Hanks.
• Judi Dench and Kate Winslet were both nominated for playing British writer Iris Murdoch at different ages in the film Iris. It was the second time that two different actresses were nominated for playing the same character in the same movie, and the second time Winslet had such a distinction. In 1997, Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated for playing the same character in Titanic.
• Composer John Williams is the most nominated living person with 41 nominations, including this year’s nods for his original scoring of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The only two people to have received more nominations were Walt Disney with 64 and composer Alfred Newman with 45. Williams has won five Oscars.
• If Dennis Muren, who was nominated for visual effects for A.I. Artificial Intelligence, wins an Academy Award this year, it would give him nine statuettes, the most held by a living person. He and composer Alan Menken are currently tied with eight Oscars apiece.

(Did the critics get what they wanted? See Jerry's Oscar Scorecard for 2001.)