Every Award Show Should Feature a Betty Gilpin Acceptance Speech

Look, award shows can get really boring — it’s rare that audiences get a true thrill like the Slap, or La La Land being called over Moonlight, or “Adele Dazeem.” Lucky for us, Betty Gilpin, who won her first Emmy for Widow’s Bay, knows how to entertain. In her acceptance speech, or rather poem, she thanked her team and co-stars and praised the actors who make the entertainment industry amazing, and she even took a bold swipe at OpenAI’s Sam Altman. It was both enjoyable and impressive as a piece of writing. Gilpin, who had been nominated three times previously for GLOW and recently starred in Oh, Mary! on Broadway, can really rhyme. We jotted down for the full speech in all its glory:

“If by some fluke you win / A poem might give it a less boring spin.  
If you lose, whisper it drunk to your date, Allie Brie / Whose toned shoulders we stand on for her work in TV.
Thank you, Widow’s Bay residents, Dippold, Murai / To Hamish and Apple, our director, Ti.
To my reps Sean, Jenny, Andrea, Dara, and Tony / Is it weird I say love you when we hang up the phone-y? (Sorry) 
Rhyming’s a vulnerability cloak / What we do means so much to me. That part’s not a joke  
Look, my family has nurses, a priest, and a teacher / I’m a spray-tanned, narcissistic, society leecher. 
But I want to thank all of the actors I’ve met / Old ladies in dressing rooms, hot guys on sets. 
What a privilege to spend this life laughing at crafty / Watching Shakespeare in theaters, half-full and drafty. 
Our business is stupid, but actors are the bomb / From Martindale to Milioti, my dad and my mom. 
To be cringe and elitist, which you’re free to find fault in / Let’s all lean toward Sam Shepard and less toward Sam Altman.”

It was a tightly planned, cleanly delivered speech that was simultaneously funny, poignant, and emotional. The speech was so good, in fact, that the only lesson that award-show producers should be taking from it is to just give Betty Gilpin time at every award show to give a speech. So she wasn’t nominated? Who cares? The speech will still probably be better than most of the actual winners’. Let her rhyme.