The academy dismissed claims that its announcement had been scooped by the Aint-It-Cool-News website which ran an early list of supposed nominees.
The supposedly leaked list contained the names of Kate Winslet (Holy Smoke) and Gwyneth Paltrow (The Talented Mr Ripley) as nominees but neither appeared in the final lists.
Happily, all 10 nominees are available to view, bundled by category, on iTunes, and there are some true marvels in the mix.
Politicising the Hugos to such a degree certainly doesn't help the nominees themselves, because authors on his slate risk being informally blacklisted by the rest of the community.
The nominees were announced by Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, actor Chris Pine and directors Alfonso Cuaron (who took the best director award last year for Gravity) and JJ Abrams, whose Star Wars film is among the most anticipated movies of the year.
Nominees for most promising newcomer in a British film are Justin Kerrigan, writer and director of Human Traffic, Ayub Khan Bin, writer of East is East, Kirk Jones, writer and director of Waking Ned, and Lynne Ramsay, writer and director of Ratcatcher.
"We generate nominees by viewer survey, and that came in the top five, but the only way it works is if we get the clips.
The number of black nominees at the Oscars has been roughly doubling every couple of decades.
In front of the academy and the nominees gathered at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles he introduced himself and waited for the applause to die down.
While the nominees are decided internally at MTV, the winners are voted for by viewers.
The nominees range from the nearly famous to the belovedly obscure, including London singer Arlissa, who recently recorded with Nas, Dublin rock band Kodaline and Toronto rapper the Weeknd, who almost won Canada's top music prize back in 2011.
