The star of one of the year’s biggest documentaries is a night owl, not an early riser, and probably had other things on her mind on Tuesday morning than her Oscar chances. So it fell to Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the directors of the documentary “RBG,” to tell Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the film was nominated.

They called her at her Watergate apartment, where she is working from home. Justice Ginsburg congratulated the filmmakers and said the academy acknowledgment was “eminently well-deserved,” they reported, barely suppressing their glee at getting to share the news with her.

“She sounded good, strong,” West said, as the justice recovers from her recent cancer surgery. “She was very happy.” And she has been following the blockbuster success of the film, so she couldn’t have been too surprised. (As a crowd-pleaser, it may even be the front-runner in the documentary category.)

[Read more about the nominations | Check out the full list of nominees | See the snubs and surprises.]

The directors and their spouses watched the nomination announcement together, at West’s Manhattan apartment, where her husband, Oren Jacoby, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in his own right, made them all scrambled eggs for breakfast — a page from the supportive partner playbook of Martin Ginsburg, the justice’s late husband and the cook in their family. “Just like Marty Ginsburg, these are guys who had their own amazing careers,” said Cohen, whose husband, Paul Barrett, is a law professor and journalist. And in the last year, “they have been just supporting our journey.”