I ran into the same problem (my Pages and Media lists were also empty, though the interface still showed the counts of each). I was running Wordpress in a subdirectory for testing and had copied a config from a tutorial for that particular setup. This line turned out to be the culprit:

fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/wordpress)(/.*)$;

I removed it with no ill effects that I can see so far and the admin pages now work as expected.