LOS ANGELES — Not long before he’s assassinated, Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk proclaims his key precept for social change: “You gotta give ’em hope.”

Hope is often lacking in Academy Awards contenders such as “Milk,” films that tend toward bleak, serious subjects that scream “Oscar” but can spell box-office poison to audiences looking for something light and relaxing even in the best of times.

With gloom and doom in the real-world economy, will moviegoers be even more reluctant to catch dark, dreary Oscar heavyweights and head instead for the happy place that a “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” can take them?

“In this atmosphere, what the country does want to see isn’t the stuff that they normally nominate for Oscars,” said John Wilson, founder of the Razzies, an Oscar spoof. “Who needs to go get more depressed right now and spend 10 or 12 bucks to do so? If that’s your idea of a good time, watch CNN, especially when they’re covering the financial stuff.”

Most likely top contenders for the Feb. 22 Oscars hit theaters in late November and December, among them “Milk,” with Penn as the slain gay-rights pioneer; “Revolutionary Road,” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a failing marriage; “Frost/Nixon,” featuring Frank Langella as President Richard Nixon after his fall from grace; and “Doubt,” starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a drama about a priest accused of abusing a boy.

Not necessarily the kind of stories to soothe people’s worries over their deflated retirement accounts amid recent stock-market turmoil.

“Escapism comes in many forms, but clearly it doesn’t come in the form that most Oscar contenders take,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “If you are putting an Oscar movie out there this season, let’s just say it’s going to be more challenging than in other years to get the box office rolling. Traction in this marketplace is a bit tougher for these kinds of films.”

Consider where audiences’ heads have been at as stocks tumbled. “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” led the box office for two straight weekends, then “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” did the same.

“I have been choosing things that seem light. More the date movies, I guess, as opposed to a World War II drama or something,” Shannon Marsnik, 34, of St. Paul, Minn., said at a theater where she had taken her two daughters and two nieces to see “High School Musical 3.”

Meantime, big-name dramas such as the terrorism tale “Body of Lies” (Russell Crowe and DiCaprio) and the police story “Pride and Glory” (Edward Norton and Colin Farrell) barely made a ripple, moviegoers ignoring them the way they have Hollywood’s attempts to dramatize the Iraq War.

“The last few weeks have been really tough for the R-rated adult films,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. “The lighter fare seems to be taking a dominant position.”

That echoes the Depression, when slapstick comedy and glamorous musicals helped lift the nation’s spirits.

As awards-worthy movies slowly creep into theaters, counting on Oscar buzz to grab audience attention, they will compete with a strong lineup of lighter fare that blasts into nationwide release with monster marketing budgets behind them.

Yet studio executives expect this Oscar season to play out like any other, with the cream of the awards contenders finding a respectable box-office niche among the just-for-fun flicks.

“I think people are going to go to both,” said Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney’s motion-picture group. “As long as we don’t have an Iraq War movie, we’re going to have a fantastic Thanksgiving and Christmas season.”

— Associated Press reporter Elizabeth Dunbar in Minneapolis contributed to this report.