The Film Experience

by Cláudio Alves

As we well know, AMPAS has major genre bias, preferring the prestigious quality of respectable dramas above everything else. Even when they decide to embrace a genre picture, there's a branch of the Academy that's always ready to turn their collective noses at them with unashamed snobbery. We're talking about the actors, whose distaste for anything remotely close to action movies, adventure, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and so forth, has robbed many great performers of the recognition they so richly deserve. Truth be told, this is a problem that goes beyond the Oscar voters and even affects popular views on the art of acting.

If you want a good example of this, look to the awards race of 1981, when Raiders of the Lost Ark was a major success with critics and audiences alike...

Transcending the usual limitations of the action-adventure genre, it went on to score eight Oscar nominations and won half of them as well as a bunch of prizes from regional critics' groups. However, one of its elements went systematically ignored throughout the season. We're referring to its actors, among them one of the biggest stars of the 1980s, Harrison Ford.

While the aforementioned genre bias is difficult to get past, Ford was, at the very least, in the conversation come awards time. His pop-cultural cachet was rarely bigger than in 1981 with two of cinema's coolest and most iconic heroes, Han Solo and Indiana Jones, now being embodied by the same man onscreen. Furthermore, Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark got a Best Picture nod and we already explored in this series how rare it is for Best Picture nominees to be ignored by the acting branch. One question arises from these ponderations on Oscar history: Was Harrison Ford worthy of a nomination for playing Indiana Jones?

Throughout his career, Ford has been often criticized for not stretching himself as an actor, rarely going deep into his characters and mostly coasting on his charisma. That's made him popular as a leading man but an unlikely candidate for riling people up when it comes time to vote for movie awards. His range is admittedly limited, but that's been the case of many a great star in the history of Hollywood. Like the best of them, Ford shows a canny talent for finding variations within his screen persona, adapting it to each role with seamless virtuosity.

Take the two heroes that have been mentioned so far, Star Wars' Han Solo and the Raiders' Indiana Jones. Superficially, the characters are similar, but there are precise variations in the way Ford plays them that make all the difference. The cynical arrogance and peacock-like pomposity of the Millennium Falcon's captain are very obviously absent from the cinema's favorite archeologist. They're both preternaturally confident men, but Ford adds a layer of abrasion to Han that he erases from Indy. Instead, he finds Jones' specificity by highlighting certain vulnerabilities.

Indiana Jones is an adventurer, but there's a dorky sense of academic curiosity seeping through his hunky façade during calmer scenes. That makes him necessarily different from a roguish mercenary and helps the audience connect to him as our guide into his world of fantastical archeology. More importantly, perhaps, is how Ford interacts with Karen Allen's Marion, Jones' old paramour. In the hands of this smart performer, our hero is a closeted romantic and there's a wounded sentimentality to his dialogues with the woman, effectively giving the picture some much needed emotional stakes.

Above all else, though, what's most evident in Ford's performance in Raiders of the Lost Ark is his ease with comedy. Without ever betraying the mounting tension of the action set pieces, he's always able to find some humorous reaction or sardonic expression to lighten things up. It's impossible to imagine the movie being as successful as it is if we removed that comedic savvy from its leading man. Harrison Ford's impeccable instincts helped make this movie into the perfect creation that it is.

Also, he's great at playing up the thrilling aspects of the narrative, an equally important quality to have when headlining such an epic adventure.

Maybe if Ford made it look more difficult, his craft wouldn't be so easily dismissed, but it's the effortless nature of his acting that makes him an ideal match for the role of Indiana Jones. He couldn't be more perfect as an instantly iconic dreamboat that's a funny action hero to boot. Harrison Ford made us believe, helped us buy into the escapist thrills of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, for that, we should be grateful. I know I am and, all this considered, it would have been nice for the Academy to extend their love for the movie to its leading man. So yes, he was certainly worthy of an Oscar nomination for playing Indiana Jones.

Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark is currently available to stream on Netflix.