2009 Honorees: Best Supporting Actress

CLAUDIA CELEDÓN for The Maid, who lacks critical distance on the full scale of her privilege, but her inchoate feelings for her maid surpass mere sympathy or cluelessness;

VERA FARMIGA for Up in the Air, because she exudes a palpable shift in thought every three seconds, while still being sexy and sporting, and still keeping mysteries at bay;

MARCIA GAY HARDEN for Whip It, whose sense of family ties, rejection of the unfamiliar, fondness for old-school femininity, and secret rebellious streak all feel so real;

MIMI KENNEDY for In the Loop, because she evokes genuine outrage, avoids the lazy ballbreaker route, and is so sharply comic with relatively few boldfaced character notes; and

MO'NIQUE for Precious, who lacks polish but emits profound commitment, blazing with anger, self-pity, and illness, forcing us to feel the lethal stakes of this story.

Extremely honorable mentions to Rona Lipaz-Michael, who is almost as gripping an observer-reactor to Hiam Abbass in Lemon Tree as Celedón is to Saavedra in The Maid; and to two secret weapons of the Mumblecore-ish set, Alycia Delmore's patient but exasperated girlfriend in Humpday and Katy O'Connor, the spacy, occasionally tearful store clerk in Beeswax, who wears her liberal bleeding heart on her thrift-store sleeve.

Next tier down, though "down" is hardly the right word, were Mariah Carey's weary, candid, but ultimately overchallenged social worker in Precious, Naturi Naughton's commanding Lil' Kim in Notorious, the deftly comic character work of Anna Chlumsky in In the Loop, the chilly, death's door maternity of Edith Scob in Summer Hours, and Hope Olaide Wilson's impressive spin on the stock role of the tough, abandoned older sister marooned on some unlucky relative's front door, this time in Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself.

Congratulations, Marcia Gay

I missed the Tonys last night, and the academic quarter system reaches so far into June that I've mostly had to abandon my once-customary practice of reading all the nominated plays before the big night, a delicious treat that this guy obviously swiped from me. I'll eventually catch up with the ceremony from someone who taped it—or, what do they say now, DVR'd it? But I do want to congratulate Marcia Gay Harden on her win as Best Lead Actress in a Play. Sometimes I totally get what Marcia Gay is doing with her roles and sometimes I totally don't, but I increasingly like that about her: you can't quite call what you're going to get. And I think she is ingratiatingly patient, thoughtful, generous, candid, and articulate in this interview about God of Carnage and the Tony experience, beautifully sailing through the frequently smug or tactless questions posed by Tom O'Neil (and that's even before his cell phone goes off mid-interview).

I'm not saying I necessarily would have voted for her, having seen none of the nominated performances, and acknowledging the formidable talents of Jane Fonda, Harriet Walter, and the transfixing Janet McTeer—one of the actresses I most often recruit when I mentally recast movies, feeling sure she'd do better than the bigger names who often snag the key roles. (Leaving Hope Davis off this list sounds like more of a dig than I mean it to, but Secret Lives of Dentists aside, she's often on a different performing wavelength than I am.) Meanwhile, speaking of mental casting, I'll look forward to reading God of Carnage and imagining what Marcia Gay might have done with the meaty part. Maybe one day I'll see for myself? More to the point, I appreciate how honest she is about wanting to win but also how sincere and reflective she is about how actors feel about these contests, and how different that often is from what we awards-mongers might project onto them, or what we over-emphasize among ourselves. Chastening and admirable. Well put, Marcia Gay—and, incidentally, way to look like a million bucks on your big night!

P.S. Lovely to hear that, one way or another, Neil Patrick Harris' first, ahem, outing as an awards-show host coincided (or not?) with a major bump upward in the ratings, and that Bret Michaels, bless him, is recovering just fine.