The first measuring stick in a marathon leading to the Oscars -- the Spirit Awards for independent films -- announced its nominations this morning.

Don't be surprised if many of the nominees do double duty on Hollywood's splashiest weekend of the year, with the Spirits handed out Feb. 26 and the Oscars a night later. The complete list of nominees is available here.

Debra Granik's Ozark Mountain daredevil act Winter's Bone led all films with seven nominations including best picture, director, screenplay, female lead (Jennifer Lawrence), supporting actors John Hawkes and Dale Dickey, and cinematography. Based on Daniel Woodrell's novel, Winter's Bone tells a chilling story of backwoods meth labs and family skeletons. You can find my review from July here, and I'll stick by my closing line that you'll likely not find a better American drama this year.

Runner-up with five Spirit nominations is Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, a dramedy about same-sex parents (Julianne Moore and nominee Annette Bening) and the sperm donor (nominee Mark Ruffalo) who returns to their lives. Cholodenko's direction and screenplay co-written with Stuart Blumberg were also nominated.

The Kids Are All Right joins Winter's Bone, 127 Hours, Black Swan and Greenberg in the best feature category, with all but Ben Stiller's latter, mumblecore comedy generally pegged as major Oscar contenders. It's years like this that prompted the academy to expand its best picture finalists to 10. Winter's Bone winning the Gotham Award for best feature Monday night gives more momentum to that scrappy gem.

Expanding to 10 best picture finalists enables voters to honor the often independently produced art that Oscar voters love while giving studio blockbusters like Toy Story 3 and Inception the chance for a best picture nod. (Only films costing less than $20 million to produce are elgible for the Spirits; a drop in the bucket compared to studio productions.)

The acting categories are a different story, with both the Spirits and Oscars featuring five finalists -- although in a break from tradition the Spirits nominated six lead female performances this year. Bening, Lawrence, Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole) and Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine) are getting the buzz that award campaigns are built upon. Bening's bypassed co-star Julianne Moore is further proof of the category's depth.

The lead actor Spirit nominees still leave the academy some wiggle room. James Franco probably sewed up an already deserved nomination for 127 Hours when he agreed to co-host the Academy Awards show. But Aaron Eckhart (Rabbit Hole) is the only other finalist with any degree of Oscar buzz at this tiime. But the Spirits have a way of drawing attention to smaller films, letting Oscar voters feel like they discovered something.

Those voters will need to do more digging than usual in the supporting actor categories, with only four Spirit nominees (Dickey, Hawkes, Ruffalo and, to a lesser extent, Bill Murray in Get Low) starring in movies that got anything more than cursory limited releases. But there are familiar names and faces -- Samuel L. Jackson and Naomi Watts in Mother and Child, and Allison Janney (Life Before Wartime) to make plugging in a DVD easier.

Among documentaries, the war chronicle Restrepo and Exit Through the Gift Shop, a profile of the graffiti artist Banksy are the only Spirit nominees among the Oscars' shortlist of 15 eligible finalists.

One caveat in using the Spirits as an Oscar barometer, and it concerns the awards' emphasis on American independent filmmaking: That leaves only the foreign film category to a frontunner like The King's Speech, and nothing for its brilliant cast (Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush must be considered Oscar favorites at the moment), director Tom Hooper or David Seidler's witty screenplay.

With the inclusion of The King's Speech and other laudable imports such as Noomi Rapace's immediately iconic work in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Spirit nominations remind us that it's a long way to the Koday Theatre stage, this is is but a first step.