Nine films are nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday. In what parts of the country was each contender the most popular?

We wanted to find out for a few reasons. There has been an increasing disconnect between films that are hits and films that Hollywood honors. The last three best picture winners (“Spotlight,” “Birdman,” “12 Years a Slave”) went unseen by most Americans, at least during their theatrical runs.

With the country so politically divided, we also wanted to know whether audience support for nominees fell along similar urban-rural or coastal-heartland fissures.

Studios don’t disclose ticket sales by region, so we did the next best thing, looking at how many active Facebook users in a given county “liked” each of the nominees. Studios increasingly use Facebook as a home base for films, with photos, videos and news regularly fed to fans.

We found that the best picture contenders had surprisingly stratified fan bases. Compare “Moonlight” and “Fences,” for instance. The poetic “Moonlight,” about a black man from a poor Miami neighborhood coming to terms with his homosexuality, had a fairly thin following in the South; its heaviest support came from New York and San Francisco. The more commercially minded “Fences,” featuring a predominantly black cast but without a gay theme, drew much of its power from Mississippi and the Carolinas.