2006 Goaties: Best Supporting Actress

Amy Smart floats through Crank on a devilishly ditzy cloud, like a cross between Gracie Allen and the Buddha. She's surrounded by chaos—hails of gunfire accompanying the news that her boyfriend (Jason Statham) is (1) a hitman and (2) dying—but she remains mostly unfazed. Half of it she doesn't notice; she's too busy picking up the contents of her spilled purse to acknowledge the bullets flying by her head. The other half she refuses to process; surely Statham is spinning stories as an excuse to break up with her. Besides, she has the hiccups. The accompanying giggle, like she's getting away with something and wants us to know it, encapsulates everything I love about her in this film.

It would be possible to be deeply offended by her characterization, if one were to choose to completely ignore the film she's inhabiting: from start to finish, it's a hilarious sendup of the action-movie genre, and every element is cranked up to 11—including the innocent girlfriend/wife role. Smart knows this, and every movement and statement is calculated to amp up what we've come to expect from the Token Girl. When she's finally processed what all the shooting and screaming is about, she's game: watch her little hoppy, shrieky dance, complete with pinwheeling forearms, during the gunfight in the warehouse. She's accepted that her boyfriend is a badass—"Don't talk to him like that! My boyfriend kills people!" she shouts at a factory worker—but she can still look mildly shocked when he punches someone and crestfallen when he kills someone. Action movies need a sensual interlude, and even when it occurs in the middle of Chinatown, she's willing to play along: "You filthy animal," she croons like the audio track on a porno, "do it right here," oblivious-but-not-oblivious to the gathering crowd. And when he whines about her stopping mid-blowjob (not to mention mid-gunfight and mid-car chase), she has the film's best rejoinder: "So you can fall asleep like you always do?"

To dismiss it as yet another dumb blonde role would be like dismissing Charles Foster Kane as yet another newspaperman, or (with a little less hyperbole) Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday as yet another dumb blonde. Smart's the smartest player in the film, and her comic timing is essential to its success.

Runner-up: In Babel, Adriana Barraza wrests the film away from the director's obsessions about fate and chance, providing it with a human center that it doesn't seem interested in developing. Unlike all the other performers, she remains unbent by the weight of all the things she's supposed to symbolize.