Awards season is all about narrative. Every year, starting roughly around the time of the Toronto International Film Festival, journalists and handicappers start speculating about which movies are likely to figure into the Oscar race—and also what those movies point to in terms of industry trends or audience preferences. This fall, the big story that emerged at TIFF was that two films about famed British scientists were looking like serious contenders: The Theory of Everything, a biographical drama based on a memoir written by Stephen Hawking’s ex-wife Jane Wilde Hawking, and The Imitation Game, a thriller enshrining mathematician Alan Turing’s success in breaking the Nazis’ famed Enigma codes late in World War II.

Both films have been tastefully directed and calibrated for mainstream appeal, built around sturdy lead performances. As Hawking, Eddie Redmayne evokes the same sort of constrained, pressurized intensity as Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989); while it would be incorrect to draw equivalencies between the real-life figures of Hawking (a theoretical physicist who was diagnosed with a motor neuron disease in his early twenties) and Christy Brown (a painter born with cerebral palsy), the critical rhetoric—and for-your-consideration-advertising campaigns—around the performances are similar. Like Day-Lewis, Redmayne is an ascendant, stage-trained British performer, and reviews have singled out the impressive display of acting technique—the subtle modulation of physical and verbal control—that he uses to signal Hawking’s gradual full-body paralysis.

No less impressive—to critics and pundits—is Benedict Cumberbatch’s turn as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. Turing doesn’t cut the same figure in the popular imagination as the wheelchair-bound Hawking, and although he’s been portrayed onscreen several times before—most notably by Derek Jacobi in the 1996 television movie Breaking the Code—it’s likely that Cumberbatch’s pained interpretation of a man whose lack of social graces belied his penetrating intellect will prove definitive. In recent weeks, the film’s distributors, the Weinstein Company, have taken out full-page For Your Consideration ads in Variety featuring encomiums to Turing’s historical importance and legacy from leading Internet-tech figures like Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin; one wonders if the producers of The Theory of Everything will retaliate by hiring experts in quantum mechanics to explain how Hawking’s work has enhanced our lives in a thirty-second spot on E!.

Whatever the outcome of this pitched battle, the fact is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rarely rewarded performers for playing scientists, either with nominations or awards. For many years, the only films that regularly featured scientists as major characters were B-movies or exploitation pictures. The mad scientist was a staple of science-fiction films, which were considered almost wholly disreputable until the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 (Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s script was parodic of vintage science-fiction films; Hal 9000’s vocal mutation from a dryly droning chatterbox to a slurring murderer was an extended riff on the cliché of the brilliant scientist who transforms into a monster—the added level of irony being that Hal was himself an amazing scientific creation.)

At the beginning of the sound era, crazed innovators abounded in horror movies from Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1931) to Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreauin Island of Lost Souls (1934). Many of these performances proved iconic—Laughton’s Dr. Moreau remains the gold standard for eccentric-genius villainy—but only one was given the literal gold seal of Academy approval: Frederic March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). The film’s literary pedigree obviously helped (maybe Walter Pidgeon would have been duly rewarded for his indelible scientist in Forbidden Planet (1952) if more voters had known it was based on The Tempest) but in truth Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a pretty salacious little Pre-Code number, its violent action coated in a thin layer of sleaze. And make no mistake: it was March’s slavering, hairy Mr. Hyde who was being rewarded rather than his milquetoast Dr. Jekyll, who is tepidly self-effacing throughout.

The Janus-faced protagonist is an archetype; he could just as easily be a Shakespearean actor (A Double Life) or a district attorney (The Dark Knight) as a chemist. The only lead actor to win an Oscar in a role as an honest-to-good, real-life scientist in the 20^th Century was Paul Muni in The Story of Luis Pasteur (1936), a prototypical classic-Hollywood biopic that presents its eponymous subject as a secular saint: handsome, well-mannered and unfaltering in the face of skepticism and criticism about his life’s work, which in this case includes pioneering advances in microbiology and infectious diseases vaccines (in the film’s most famously campy moment, a supercilious French doctor played by Fritz Leiber, Sr., contemptuously injects himself with a rabies sample to suggest that his rival is incompetent).

In 1942, Greer Garson won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Mrs. Miniver;a year later, she was nominated for playing Marie Curie in Madame Curie, which was styled by director Mervyn LeRoy as a romantic drama. As Pierre Curie, Walter Pidgeon sweeps Garson’s Polish chemistry student off her feet before helping her to isolate radium (a process that this leisurely paced two-hour film allots more screen time than might be expected). After that, it’s not until Sigourney Weaver played zoologist Dianne Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist (1988) that a woman was even nominated for playing a scientist.

It’s far more common that actors are rewarded for playing the subjects of scientific experiments, from Joanne Woodward’s hypnotized schizophrenic in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) to Cliff Robertson’s artificially smartened Charly (1968). In Awakenings (1990), Robin Williams played the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks, but it was his co-star Robert De Niro, as a catatonic patient briefly revived by an experimental drug treatment, who was nominated for Best Actor. This is understandable: award voters historically prefer showy performances, and so actors who suggest heightened states of stress or trauma—as are popularly understood to be the side effects of scientific experimentation—find themselves sitting pretty.

Hence the kudos (and Oscar) for Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (2001), playing the mathematician and game theorist John Forbes Nash Jr. who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Very loosely based on Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 biography of Nash, the film contains a pulpy subplot in which Nash is recruited after World War II by the Pentagon to decode encrypted enemy communications (shades of Alan Turing); near the end, it’s revealed that his government supervisors are hallucinations—figures in an elaborately paranoid interior universe. Crowe not only gets to act Nash as a brash, brilliant thinker—in scenes that play up his intellectual superiority to his peers—but he also gets to go to pieces; it’s like Charly in reverse. A Beautiful Mind was pilloried by some critics for essentially reducing the symptoms of mental illness to the stuff of a B-movie thriller; in spite of this—or maybe because of it—it remains the only film about a scientist to win Best Picture.