2006 Flak Film Also-Ran Awards: The Steak Knives
Second-Best Actor
by Flak Staff

The first installment in a five-part Oscars feature

 Photo Slideshow

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.

Nicolas Cage
Lord of War

Nicolas Cage was the most overlooked Hollywood actor of last year. He created two completely opposite characters — one a Midwestern dope, the other a smooth international arms dealer — and made them both intimate. That might explain why The Weather Man and Lord of War failed to become blockbusters: The masses pay to see Cage in The Rock and National Treasure, and this year they got actual movies.

Here, Cage plays Yuri, a son of diner-owning immigrant in New York, who finds that where there's political unrest, there's money in guns. He jet-sets all over the globe, and specifically to Liberia, to keep various strongmen, dictators and "reformers" in the latest automatic rifle technology. He's the logical end of the "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People" philosophy: He's not pulling the trigger, so where's the moral quandary? Cage and writer/director Andrew Niccol tell the story straight, without preaching, because the amorality of Yuri contains the entire debate within himself. Cage can deliver a line like "Back then, I didn't sell to Osama Bin Laden. Not because of moral reasons, but because he was always bouncing checks," so smoothly that you almost miss the joke. Which makes it all the funnier and more sardonic.

Cage has to employ his Big Hollywood Star charisma to pull this off, yet perform as Oscar-Winning Actor Nicolas Cage to draw us into Yuri's story. Few stars can really pull that off these days — George Clooney, Nicole Kidman and Cage, to name a few. It takes a special actor to say, "Without operations like mine it would be impossible for certain countries to conduct a respectable war. I was able to navigate around those inconvenient little arms embargos," without a hint of evil in his voice. It's this veil of unawareness that Hollywood does best:

Liberian Strongman: Can you bring me the gun of Rambo?
Yuri: Part One, Two or Three?

— Stephen Himes

Steve Carell
The 40-Year-Old Virgin

America loves a good melodrama, doesn't it? It seems as though you can't be nominated for an acting Oscar if your character wasn't killed/ lynched/ hated/ somehow misunderstood in the course of the film in which you starred. Or is gay. Actually, you can probably file that under "lynched."

Reveling in your own drama is both easy and unrealistic. In life, people make light of their tragedy, and comedy that communicates this is a more complex and rare bird than a tearjerker. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carell plays one of the most endearing, pathetic, hilarious and sad characters in recent memory. Rather than have his funniness count against him, Carell should get more laurels for the way he used both the levity in his own character, and his relationship with the other characters, to outline the small tragedy of a man who has never, ever known the love of a woman.

This is a character who, in trying to describe boobs he has never felt, says they feel like "a bag of sand." Carell has created a man teetering of the verge of a grand mal existential dilemma, but who still enjoys the hell out of his bike ride to work. You want tearjerking? Try watching a grown man try to get small-talk advice from four dude's dudes by asking, "What am I supposed to say, 'I went to magic camp?' 'I'm an accomplished ventriloquist?'" Now that is the tragedy of the human condition. Joaquin Phoenix can shove it. — Aemilia Scott

Ralph Fiennes
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Wasn't it just delicious? For all the moviemaking magic that carried viewers through the stretch of Goblet of Fire, the film boils down to Fiennes' eight minutes of decadent prancing about a graveyard. The weight of expectations was approaching unbearable; across four books, Rowling had pigeonholed ol' Voldie to about as close to the devil as one can without giving him horns. Out comes Fiennes, taking an elegant rather than masculine angle with the character that elicits T.H. White's conundrum: Is might really right? Here, at long last, is Voldemort, and he seems roughly as intimidating as an orchestra conductor, yet his henchmen cower.

Fiennes has such a soft touch with the character that you instantly realize: This mutha's tactical. He doesn't want or need wizard war. This is no Mussolini or Mao Tse Tung; yes, he is terrible, but his kind of change isn't going to come through the barrel of a gun. It's going to arrive by instilling fear into the hearts of every member of the wizarding community. Fiennes puts a face and a personality on a man who uses terror to make his strides, and that seems like a rather pertinent incarnation of the bad guy in this age. Observe him closely: It's no longer the hulking, mammoth monster we fear. It's the lowly snake. — Andy Stilp

Bill Murray
Broken Flowers

Bill Murray should have won an Oscar for his performance in Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation, and he's very likely even better in Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch's latest drab masterpiece. He wasn't nominated for an Oscar for Broken Flowers, of course — Jarmusch's films are a bit weird for the Academy — but he absolutely should have been. All the natural humor Murray poured into movies like Caddyshack and Ghostbusters is bottled up in Broken Flowers. Not hidden or ignored. Bottled up. Murray's character, Don Johnston, is a funny guy. It's there, just under the surface. It peeks its head out with occasional wry comments that get Johnston into trouble as much as they amuse, but that's about all he can muster, because he's far more sad than funny. It's overpowering — even he doesn't realize at first, but depression is taking over; he's desperate. He's pushed it too far, his bachelor lifestyle, and it's eventually easy to see — somehow, through Murray's almost immutably bleak expression — why Johnston does what he does, what he's thinking, what he's feeling, what he wants, hates and loves about his past, present and future. And why he'll likely spend the rest of his life with the exact same detached look on his face. — Chris Shadoian

Vince Vaughn
Wedding Crashers

Every year, some critics bemoan the lack of comedies on top 10 lists. This year, the token "look, I'm hip because this is on my list" comedy was The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Which is a good movie, but the comedic performance of the year has to belong to Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers.

It was Noam Chomsky who convinced me that Vince Vaughn was brilliant in Wedding Crashers. A few years ago, Chomsky wrote that the American mind wasn't dead, it was just wasted on the wrong things. Witness the voluminous retention of facts, in-depth and detailed analysis, the sheer weight of brain power used on and philosophical insights gained into sports. Hell, there are serious people who claim that Sabermetrics pioneer Bill James is an American philosopher. Chomsky's idea was that man didn't "care" about the wrong things — we just needed to make politics and intellectual subjects as compelling as sports.

Vince Vaughn is the apotheosis of Chomsky's notion of the American male. The man is brilliant and quick: Look at the way he skillfully turns a harsh divorce conference into a settlement. That might just be slickness, but the way he uses language just in conversation points to ability of a higher order. A "stage-three clinger" indicates that there are other, subtle grades of clinger — the same sort of economic analysis we might pour into tech stocks. He peppers his words with a certain jock poetry: "John, I was first team All-State. I can put the ball anywhere I want to. I'll make it rain out here," or "Hot read! Hot read!" during a touch football game. Or the amount of reflection on dating: "You're sitting there, you're wondering, 'Do I have food on my face? Am I eating? Am I talking too much? Are they talking enough? Am I interested? I'm not really interested, should I play like I'm interested but I'm not that interested but I think she might be interested but do I want to be interested but now she's not interested?' So all of the sudden I'm getting, I'm starting to get interested."

Perhaps more description would take away from the performance, but Vaughn's virtuosity cannot be ignored. His self-assured, self-aware Gen X counterpart to Owen Wilson's slacker persona embodies the jocular detachment of many man-boys his age: the machine gun, SportsCenter, pop culture-informed nature of his banter coupled with a certain sense of wasted erudition. However, the movie is missing a big Walkenizing speech: Imagine the missed beats of co-star Christopher Walken versus the staccato patter of Vaughn. Chomsky would put it in his top 10. — Stephen Himes

Second-best Actress
Second-best Screenplay
Second-best Director
Second-best Picture

Produced by Andy Adams.