Why? Since Dustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar playing “Rain Man,” a majority of Best Actor Oscars were taken home by men playing the sick or handicapped. Eddie Redmayne’s win on Sunday for playing Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” made it official: 14 of 27 Best Actors tackled characters facing significant mental or physical barriers to what many consider normal life....

Yet, in the past few decades, playing the sick or handicapped seems a clear path to Oscar gold. Heck, Tom Hanks — playing Andrew Beckett, the gay lawyer with AIDS in “Philadelphia,” and the mentally challenged Forrest Gump — did it twice in two years.

For some, the bevy of Academy Awards won by able actors transforming themselves to appear otherwise isn’t a cause for celebration.

“The ultimate ambition of David Oyelowo’s performance as Martin Luther King, Jr. is to express the reality of black life and black history in a way that resonates with those within the black community and educates those outside it,” Scott Jordan Harris, a disabled author, wrote in Slate. “The ultimate ambition of Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking is to contort his body convincingly enough to make other able-bodied people think ‘Wow! By the end I really believed he was a cripple!’ Our attitudes to disability should have evolved past the stage when this mimicry is considered worthy of our most famous award for acting.”