Film fans and Academy are worlds apart

This year's crop of Oscar-nominated films are all the things that delight film critics; dark, inventive, challenging and unusually brutal. One thing they aren't, however, is popular. Out of the 10 highest grossing films of 2007, only the Pixar animated comedy Ratatouille appears on any of the shortlists for the major Oscars.

To put the problem in perspective, last year's best picture winner, The Departed, took more than $100m at the box office before the Oscar nominations were even announced. This year, in the same three months between release and nomination, the Coen Brothers' gore-soaked No Country for Old Men (right) - up for best picture and best director at the Oscars on February 24 - made less than half of that, only $44m.

The American film critic Roger Ebert can give There Will be Blood as many thumbs-ups as he likes - but cinema-goers just don't want to go and see it. To date Paul Thomas Anderson's oil epic, starring Daniel Day-Lewis in a role that could hardly have received more ecstatic acclaim (including the Bafta award for best actor), has grossed just over $37m internationally since it opened on Boxing Day. Compare that with this year's obligatory 'charming indie hit' Juno which was released on Christmas Day and has already grossed more than $142m worldwide

Not even Brad Pitt could convince punters to sit down and watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which has taken a paltry $14m since its release in September, despite good reviews.

So what's going on? There was a time when the Oscars were won by brilliantly made and hugely popular films such as Lawrence of Arabia, which won the big awards in 1962, or, three decades later, The Silence of the Lambs, which swept the board in 1991.

Both of these films have been the subject of Paul Gambaccini's current Radio 4 series And the Academy Award Goes to.... Gambaccini told The First Post: "Sadly, the mass American audience has dumbed down over the last 30 years, with the result being that almost no films of note come out of the big studios. Their quality material comes from their arthouse divisions."

Thus Hollywood film-making has gone off in two directions: blockbusters into which the studios pour millions for marketing - such as Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End which has taken $961m worldwide - and 'quality' films such as No Country, for which the small marketing budget is directed at insiders who will nominate the films for awards. As a result, these films get small audiences and lots of prizes.

The question is, can Hollywood afford to continue to make Oscar-potential films as a breed apart from popular box office hits? A recent report found that major film studios lost a grand total of almost $2bn in 2006 due to the ever-increasing costs of production set against dwindling audiences and poor DVD sales. Haemorrhaging money thanks to the writers' strike, Hollywood badly needs this year's Oscars to tempt people back into the cinema - and they have stubbornly refused to oblige.

Until now, The Last Emperor, which grossed $75m (in today's money) in 1987, looked unbeatable as the least popular best picture Oscar winner of recent times. That record is set to be broken this year. ·