For a little while there in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ed Harris was a fixture of the Academy Awards. Harris has secured four Oscar nominations, with three of these four nods being in the Best Supporting Actor category. With movies ranging from “Apollo 13” to “The Hours,” the Oscar nominations Harris has secured reflect his versatility as a performer and the creative hot streak he was in for nearly a decade in his career. Despite being nominated so many times, Harris never did win an Academy Award, with this streak of losses being partially due to how the movies Harris was nominated for didn’t secure a ton of Oscars. “Apollo 13,” for instance, only garnered two Oscar wins in below-the-line categories, with no victories for acting or Best Picture.
Similarly, “The Truman Show” didn’t win any of the three Oscars that it was nominated for, while “Pollack,” the movie that gave Harris his sole Best Actor Oscar nomination, was only up for one other Oscar, Best Supporting Actress (though Marcia Gay Harden did win in that category for “Pollock”). With none of the movies he was nominated for becoming unstoppable juggernauts in their Oscar wins, Harris never got the hype needed to clinch an Oscar win. Even without emerging victorious at the Academy Awards, though, scoring so many nominations in a brief period is a remarkable feat for Ed Harris.
