2007 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Actress
by Flak Staff

The second installment in a five-part Oscars feature

To be eligible for the Steak Knives, candidates must not have been recognized by the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards or in the top tier of the Village Voice Take Seven Critics' Poll. To see the ineligible nominees, click here.

Jennifer Aniston
Friends with Money

She doesn't perfect exotic accents for her characters, nor does she ugly herself up with prostheses to prove she's a Serious Actress; as for her characters' motivations, they're either right up front or missing entirely. But Jennifer Aniston remains one of our most watchable screen actresses, and bravest too. She wisely doesn't stray too far from the Babe Next Door role that made her Friends fortune, but she finds plenty of variation in that narrow range. Sometimes she's sunny, shallow and sweet (Bruce Almighty, Along Came Polly), but she can have edge — for example, her flair-averse waitron in Office Space, the life-wrecking jinx of The Good Girl and the psychopath's accessory in Derailed.

Aniston shows a knack for picking good little projects and her role in Friends with Money is another such. It's a chilly little ensemble piece about the economy of the soul and the role of money in relationships both social and romantic. It's way too talky, bitter and static to make it at the mall megaplex. Aniston plays a beautiful loser — a teacher so burned out on the condescension of her rich students that she has quit and now supports herself and her pot habit by cleaning houses, while being exploited and cheated on by a buff airhead. (He visits her on the job, they play a little maid-and-master, and then he demands a cut of the cleaning fee!) Somehow Aniston mopes through this so credibly one wants to slap her and snap her out of it, and then she does, sort of. Maybe her own famous heartaches prepared her perfectly for the role; if so we should be thankful she brought her home-life to the office. — David Essex

Ivana Baquero
Pan's Labyrinth

The critics have nearly unanimously celebrated Guillermo del Toro's film, a fantastical vision overlaying a brutal portrayal of fascism. Overlooked is the performance at the center of the film, Ivana Baquero as Ofelia, the little girl who travels with her mother to the outpost of Capitan Vidal, one of Franco's cruel subordinates. Baquero navigates a tricky character arc, from a sparkling lass dreaming she's a princess, to a mature battle-hardened girl. The brilliance of her performance is in making her scenes with the creatures of her imagination as real to her as they are to us. In Ofelia's eyes, the Pale Man is as terrifying as Capitan Vidal; her conversations with Pan as intimate as those with her mother. Considering that much of her acting had to be done to accommodate special effects or against green screens, Ivana Baquero is more than ready for Hollywood. — Stephen Himes

Maria Bello
Thank You for Smoking

Maria Bello's real break came in The Cooler, where she played the tart with a heart hired to keep William Macy's jinx in the casino — where he could sour a high roller's luck with his fecal touch. She was wonderful at this, sporting a crooked smile and enough of a rode-hard manner to suggest that more bad luck might bring her full circle into the jackpot. In A History of Violence she played a sort of lawyer/homemaker supermom who is wrapped a little too tight. She's happy to don her cheerleader outfit for her man's delectation, and coolly willing to tell a straight-up lie for him too. Her whole manner suggests she has a dubious history of her own, though we never get a glimpse of it.

In Thank You for Smoking Bello is Polly Bailey, one of the "MOD Squad," three merchants of death who daily unwind from protecting health hazards from regulation over drinks at a Washington bar. Once again she's pitch perfect, both one of the boys and a hard-drinking party girl. It seems like she must have put in some hard, well-martini'd hours at the Capital Grille to channel this kind of woman, who has no woman friends and can only be open with her peers in cynicism. She's got it down though, glowing with the kind of sly radiance that could flatter a committee chair into thinking he was sexy so she could tell him what to think and make him think he thought it up. — David Essex

Diane Lane
Hollywoodland

Much is said about the shelf life of Hollywood actresses, that once you reach your 40s, only distinguished British stage actresses and Meryl Streep get decent roles. Then, in 2002, Diane Lane smoldered in Adrian Lyne's gynophobic Unfaithful. As Richard Gere's middle-aged wife, she gave the sort of sultry performance that was usually reserved for the Heather Grahams of the world — but with one key difference: Lane can act.

Growing older hasn't taken Lane out of the game; she's made a cottage industry out of the sexy midlife crisis. Under the Tuscan Sun and Must Love Dogs are the cute flip side of the Unfaithful coin, but Hollywoodland is something different altogether. Here, she shows more range: Her Toni Mannix arcs from trophy wife to desperate has-been who has "another seven good years, then my ass drops like a duffel bag." At the beginning of the film, she woos George Reeves as a boytoy, then gradually turns more affectionate and desperate as her wrinkles begin to show. A creature of Hollywood, she treats her sexuality like Cinderella's carriage: She's scared that she won't find the man with her glass slipper before her ass takes the shape of a pumpkin. Lane herself, though, is far savvier: She's embraced her age and made herself indispensable to Hollywood. — Stephen Himes

Gretchen Mol
The Notorious Bettie Page

Bettie Page was an interesting woman. Quiet, thoughtful, conservative and religious: a real whitebread homebody, ready-made for mom-meeting, and the sort of person who'd say "what the heck" when asked to take her panties off during a photo shoot in the woods.

Page was an anomaly of unself-consciousness amongst models. Gretchen Mol, who played Page in The Notorious Bettie Page, isn't quite as anomalous. Hardly a modern actress manages to make it big without taking at least some of her clothes off in her career pursuit, and Mol's certainly unexceptional in this respect. She's appeared nude before, in several films; prior to this role she was most famous for a rather nipply appearance on the cover of the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair, an issue that wondered if she might be Hollywood's next "it" girl. Gorgeous and sexy she may've been, but "it" she wasn't. Her roles have been entirely unremarkable in their tunnel-vision focus on her sheer, blonde beauty, and from 1998 to 2006 — an eternity in Hollywood actress years — Mol and her career languished.

With nothing much to lose, perhaps a "what the heck" attitude is what nudged Mol to risk playing Page, and why she was able to capture Page's free spirit. Mol grabbed the role with both hands. She wore the wig, had her eyebrows dyed black, took every stitch of clothing off, repeatedly and with total abandon. Not for one solitary second of the film did she seem self-conscious about celebrating her nakedness, or of the permanent celluloid scrutiny of her body, which is precisely why Page herself was — and still is — so popular. Is Mol an "it" girl at last? Perhaps. "Flattery is the Devil's tool," she says as Page, naked, smiling, standing in the woods — and she certainly deserves some. — Chris Shadoian

Second-best Actor
Second-best Screenplay
Second-best Director
Second-best Picture