SERIOUS moviegoers tend to view the Oscars as a sideshow, and a d?class? one at that, with little relation to quality cinema. Important Films, the convention holds, do not don a revealing frock and traipse the red carpet, risking a fondling by Isaac Mizrahi.

But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ growing tendency to nominate and vote for ambitious, risky films — movies that reside outside the forest of studio blockbusters — suggests that the annual bacchanal actually nurtures important work.

In a business that is almost always about the money, the appeal to vanity — a shot at the most coveted prize in almost any industry — has yielded the so-called Oscar film, a movie aimed at adults that makes its debut late in the year with an eye toward getting a date with the statue. The current season is thick with such releases: “Atonement,”"Charlie Wilson’s War,”“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,”“Into the Wild,”“Lars and the Real Girl,”“Michael Clayton,”“No Country for Old Men,”“There Will Be Blood” and many others. Oscar hopes undoubtedly played a role in the executive decision to approve these movies, which are not exactly going to have hordes of teenagers lining up at the multiplex.

That is not to say that absent gold-plated dreams, some of these films wouldn’t have been made, only that more of them made it to a significant number of theaters, and did so with the kind of budgets and stars that can make for great movies. If the conceit holds true — industry insiders say the word “Oscar” comes up in serious movie pitches as much as “and” and “the” — people who care about serious “fil-lims” should skip the marathon of Iranian documentaries on Feb. 24 and assemble some friends and nachos to watch this year’s Oscars, with Jon Stewart as host.

It would be nice if there were a pot of gold statues at the end of this particular holiday season, because after healthy summer box-office grosses it’s been brutal out there. All sorts of serious movies have collided and then collapsed in the fight for audiences. The filmgoing public is all the better for all these movies, but the dreary financial numbers will go down a little better if film companies are in the hunt for an Oscar, the kind of recognition that could provide a boost for movies that still have a ways to go to recoup their costs.

The general formula for most filmmaking could be broken down thusly: Concept + stars + brute-force marketing = hoped-for payday. The studio system, with a need to appeal to plenty of people with huge opening weekends, does not generally lead to great cinema. But when the hydraulics of prestige are introduced into that equation, odd and wonderful things can happen. Big paydays are forgone by actors, directors work with (and for) far less money, and studios put money and promotion into films that have limited financial horizons. Actors, producers and directors know that when all is said and done, their obituaries are not going to mention their lifetime box-office tallies. The Oscars, by forcefully acknowledging artistic excellence, help people access the angels of their better natures.

“Oscar movies can be a kind of check and balance that can produce innovation, movies that break new ground and point the way for the future,” said David Poland of the Web site Movie City News (moviecitynews.com).

Making movies is a trying collective endeavor, and attempting to make one that contains difficult subject matter — the best-picture nominees in 2005 tackled journalism, homophobia, racism and terrorism — can be Sisyphean. No one ever got chased off a studio lot for not failing to back, say, a multilingual triptych about the vagaries of human communication like “Babel,” a movie that Paramount Vantage backed last year to a best-picture nomination. John Lesher, president of Paramount Vantage, Paramount’s specialty film division, said the film was made because it was a good idea, not because it might win awards. But once “Babel” was in the hunt, “it helped brand the film,” he said. “It is less about making a prestige film than the fact that actors want to do good work in addition to making blockbusters. The best, most interesting careers do both.”

And if generating great big box-office returns were the only consideration, how much work would we be seeing from Philip Seymour Hoffman, the anti-movie star who hardly meets the studio standard for “relatability” but seems to be one of the best actors on the planet and won the best-actor Oscar for the 2005 film “Capote”? As it is, he is present this season in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and “The Savages.”

“Think of how many projects get made because their backers think or hope or dream that they are going to be Oscar movies,” said Sasha Stone, the longtime Academy blogger who runs Awards Daily (awardsdaily.com). “The answer this year, and most, is a lot.”

Much of the Oscar appetite is coming from the actors themselves. After Halle Berry revealed much of herself in “Monster’s Ball” for a best-actress win for 2001 and Charlize Theron disappeared under mounds of makeup in “Monster” to similar effect for the 2003 award, actors realized that more than ever, forgoing a big check in the short run for a vivid turn in a high-quality movie could lead to long-running credibility and perhaps bigger roles down the road.

“Actors and directors say the word to their agents, and their agents say it to them to get them to do a movie,” said Mark Gill, chief executive of the Film Department, a new independent company. “It may not be the sun — the be-all and end-all — but it is certainly the moon, with a significant gravitational pull.”

Industry executives said that the Oscars have become part of the lexicon of making deals, with contracts that offer bonuses for nominations and awards, even getting down to the specifics of an Oscar campaign in support of the movie. And a financial calculus of another sort is entering the picture along with some of the newer players in the industry.

“There’s a lot of fresh money coming into our business,” said David T. Friendly, who received a nomination last year as a producer of “Little Miss Sunshine.” “Most of these investors have already made their fortunes. So what are they really after? A lot of them are trying to make films that make a difference and movies that might land them that ultimate prize."

And say what you want about the Oscars, there is no sure-fire way to game the Academy process, other than finding great directors and giving them the resources to make an ambitious film. Cynics and outsiders like to suggest that Academy members are too far removed from the cultural mainstream to reflect the best of contemporary cinema. But a look at the choices for best picture in recent years suggests that they don’t always play it safe. In 2005 “Million Dollar Baby” came out of nowhere to win, and “Crash” took the same route in 2006. Like them or hate them, they still represented fully realized visions that had nothing to do with selling action figures.

The allure of the Oscar is precious precisely because there are so few of them — one best movie, one best actor, one best actress — and because the award maintains fundamental integrity. The Academy process, for all its excesses, still carries great weight in the industry in part because it represents the will of 5,800 members from all branches of the industry, both active and retired.

“A lot of us in the Academy take our membership as a kind of fiduciary responsibility,” said Robert Shaye, co-chief executive of New Line Cinema. “We are being asked what we want the world to see of our industry, and that inspires respect and even some awe from those who accept the responsibility.”

Sure, there are occasional outrages — few would argue in retrospect that “Dances With Wolves” is a better movie than “Goodfellas,” as the Academy did in 1990 — but things started to change in the mid-1990s, most especially in 1996. That’s when four small movies — “The English Patient,” which won, “Fargo,”“Secrets and Lies” and “Shine” — all became best-picture finalists, along with a single big-studio picture, “Jerry Maguire.” And under Harvey Weinstein, Miramax proved that a specialty division, albeit with Disney’s backing, could fight from the hills and win it all, as it did with “Shakespeare in Love” in the awards for 1998.

James Schamus, chief executive of Focus Features, Universal’s boutique division, pointed out that many of the current Academy members came of age professionally in the ’60s and ’70s during an explosion of ambitious cinema. Their reflex, he said, is toward taking artistic risks.

“The Academy has stepped out of the mainstream in many of their choices over the past few years because many of the people who are voting have that rebel spirit from those days,” said Mr. Schamus, whose offerings this Oscar season include “Atonement” and Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution.” “But there is no sure way to make that happen. You can’t put the cart before the horse. We all have dreams of holding a statue and thanking all the little people, but you have to do the work on a great movie that succeeds in a very certain way. And that’s no simple matter.”