LOS ANGELES (AP) — It’s a common complaint among movie fans — that the Academy Awards honours films no one has seen.

Not quite right, but closer to the mark this year than most.

For the first time in the three years since Oscar organisers expanded the best-picture category to more than five films, there’s not a single blockbuster in the running. Billion-dollar worldwide hits such as “Avatar” and “Toy Story 3” have been in the best-picture mix the last two years, along with such huge smashes as “Up,” ‘’Inception” and “The Blind Side.”

The only contender this time that has made it to the $100 million mark domestically is the Deep South tale “The Help” at $169.7 million — big business for a drama with a heavily female audience.

But the rest of the best-picture lineup ranges from a slim $13.3 million domestically for the family drama “The Tree of Life” to a modest $78.8 million for the World War I saga “War Horse” — one of the smallest audiences ever for a film from blockbuster maestro Steven Spielberg.

It’s not just studio bottom lines that are affected when Oscar films fail to catch fire at the box office. The Oscar show itself can suffer, since bigger TV audiences tend to tune in when enormous hits such as “Titanic” or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” are in the thick of the awards race.

As of last weekend, the domestic haul for this season’s nine best-picture nominees totaled $595.6 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. That’s less than half the business done by the 10 nominees a year ago and about a third of the revenues for the 10 contenders two years ago. (The Oscars have only nine nominees this time because of a rule change requiring that films receive a certain percentage of first-place votes.)

The big hits of 2011 — “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” ‘’Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” ‘’The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1,” ‘’The Hangover Part II” — just were not best-picture material.

“I think there is a disconnect, but then I think there’s supposed to be a disconnect. It’s not about what are the most popular films. It’s the films deemed by the voting body to be the best pictures of the year,” said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Often times, what the academy thinks is a great movie isn’t a movie a general audience wants to see.”