Is there an academy generation gap?

One movie focuses on a king overcoming a crippling stammer so he can inspire wartime England. The other looks at an alienated Harvard undergrad inventing a social network so he can stick it to the elites. One stars Mr. Darcy. The other features the guy who tore off Janet Jackson’s top during the Super Bowl halftime show. One has Churchill and Chamberlain, the other beer bongs and status updates.

It’s early yet, but this year’s best picture race — for both the Globes and the Oscars — is quickly shaping up as a battle of old versus new, pitting the emotional uplift of the historical drama “The King’s Speech” against the exhilarating immediacy of “The Social Network.”

Both films feature top-notch actors playing sharply drawn characters but, really, that’s where the similarities end. “The King’s Speech,” which opened last week, follows the friendship between England’s King George VI ( Colin Firth) and the speech therapist ( Geoffrey Rush) who tries to rid him of a stammer. The movie plays as a “Masterpiece Theatre”-style crowd-pleaser, containing a veritable checklist of elements (Royalty! History! British accents!) that academy members have lapped up over the years.

“The Social Network,” meanwhile, stands on the other side of the emotional divide — cool, complex and focusing on an audaciously unlikable lead character, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ( Jesse Eisenberg), while unraveling a “Rashomon”-like tale for the Internet Age. Certainly, the movie doesn’t envelop its audience in a feel-good embrace, appropriate enough, since it could be read as a referendum on the emotional disengagement some see inherent in Facebook’s world.

Both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” have their fans. Predictably, though, support has split along generational lines. Older academy members have been filling the early “King’s Speech” screenings and, according to those attending, haven’t been shy about cheering when the closing credits appear. Most of these folks had also seen “The Social Network” but gave it a much more muted response at the theater.

“If you’re older, you’re more likely to see the movie as a cautionary tale about the insincerity of technology taking the place of human contact,” says “Social Network” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. “If you’re under 25, you’re more likely to see Mark Zuckerberg as a rock star who built something great.”

Either interpretation, of course, could count as an endorsement of “The Social Network.” But the thinking in this advanced tea-leaf-reading stage of the award races is that “The King’s Speech” rates as a blue-hair special while younger, tech-savvy voters will plug into “The Social Network.”

Unless, that is, the academy’s taste in film has gradually shifted over the last few years.

The question is: Has that happened and we’re just beginning to notice?

“People falsely associate conservatism with age,” says writer-director Paul Weitz, an academy member who received an Oscar nomination for co-writing “About a Boy.” “I just had a play running in New York, and one of the characters was a dominatrix. The matinee audiences were full of people in their 80s, and it was fun to see how little aghast they were.”

“Older people in the academy came of age with ‘Easy Rider’ and all sorts of films that are way more risky than what Hollywood makes now,” Weitz adds. “These people are in no way conservative in their tastes.”

Then there’s the math to consider. The academy has invited 848 new members into its ranks over the last seven years. With 5,783 voting members, this amounts to roughly a 7% infusion of fresh blood.

“The demographics of the academy are slowly shifting,” says “Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich. “It’s just natural. It’s not that the academy is getting that much younger, it’s just that a new generation is being slowly folded into the mix.”

And these new inductees—this year’s class included the likes of James Gandolfini, Jeremy Renner, writer Nick Hornby and Bono—aren’t suddenly going to develop a penchant for stodgy storytelling.

“You look at filmmakers like Spike Jonze or Darren Aronofsky or David O. Russell and the people working with them … they’re all bringing their point-of-view to the table,” says a veteran award-season consultant, whose work requires her to speak on background. “That’s going to show up in the final Oscar tally.”

And it has. The last three Oscar best picture winners — “The Hurt Locker,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “No Country for Old Men” — were smaller-budgeted, independent movies directed by three of the most respected filmmakers working today. And the year before that, Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” won, beating a prestige picture about, yes, British royalty (“The Queen”), even though many pundits at the time thought Scorsese’s movie might be too violent for the academy’s supposedly refined tastes.

“It bodes well for the future and for those of us who abhor Oscar bait,” says director Doug Liman, who joined the academy in 2008, in time to vote for “Slumdog Millionaire.” “If I’m reflective of the other people joining, then it’s inevitable that the academy will become less stuffy.”

Given that Liman’s class that year included Judd Apatow, Kimberly Peirce, Diablo Cody, Michael Haneke and Sacha Baron Cohen, he may have a point. Then again, all that applause coming from the “King’s Speech” screenings could signify that stirring, well-crafted period pieces can transcend age boundaries and square up a lump in anyone’s throat.

On the other side, Sorkin believes his movie can wow the Luddites.

“Facebook isn’t my cup of tea, but it doesn’t have to be your cup of tea to enjoy the movie,” Sorkin says. “Even if you’ve never been on Facebook, you have as much chance at enjoying it as someone who checks their status 10 times a day.”

Or someone who cheered at the end of “The King’s Speech.”

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