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Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and Titanic: All box-office hits and Oscar-winning pictures. Traditionally, the annual Academy Awards has served to deliver movie audiences the comforting message that the most popular Hollywood movies were also the best. Even as recently as 2000, every nominated picture finished in the Top 10 at the box office. Things have changed.

This year, not one of the Top 15 box-office movies is an Oscar contender. As No Country for Old Men producer Scott Rudin told Variety, the major studios "are so risk-adverse they've gotten out of the quality picture business."

None of the top five films this year was financed by a big studio. (Though Michael Clayton is a Warner Bros. film, it was bankrolled by a Boston real-estate developer.) Others were financed through specialty divisions and non-studio money. Two leading films, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, were co-productions of Paramount Vantage and the independent Miramax. Atonement comes through Universal-distributed Focus Features. Fox Searchlight co-financed Juno with indie company Mandate Pictures. Why should the average moviegoer care how a film was financed? Because there's less chance the average moviegoer will have seen the Oscar-nominated films.

All five nominated movies have budgets of $30-million or under. Cumulatively, the best-picture nominees earned $295-million (U.S.) at the box office (including Juno's $120-million bonanza), for a historically low 3 per cent of last year's total box office. Most of the acting nominations are also for low-earning movies: Julie Christie in Away from Her ($4.5-million); Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There ($3.8-million); Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah ($6.7-million) and Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ($3.9-million). An Oscar show that exposes quality, little-known films to a broad audience sounds terrific, but there's a catch. A competition between obscure films translates into lower ratings for the Oscar broadcast and less promotional value for the winners. As the gap between quality and popular movies grows, the Academy Awards audience continues its overall downward slide (to about 39 million American viewers last year). The last time the Oscars was an unqualified hit was in 1998 when 55 million Americans enjoyed a foregone conclusion, as the modern era's biggest blockbuster, Titanic, swept the awards.