I hadn’t posted this earlier due to some photo glitches with the old blogcast software recently, but I presented the Best Supporting Actress Award to Amy Ryan this past weekend at the annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards dinner. Well, to her friend and fellow actor Tate Donovan, actually (below). Ryan couldn’t attend, and not just because she heard I was “grabby.” (Donovan doesn’t mind, he gives as good as he gets.) No, Ryan was in Spain filming Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Paul Greengrass‘ follow-up to The Bourne Ultimatum, opposite costars Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear.



There was a little speech, which I did not deliver in song, alas, but the text of my introductory essay, from the awards booklet, reads as follows:

“It’s been a breakthrough and haphazardly maternal sort of year on the big screen for Tony-nominated stage actress Amy Ryan, with a slate of film roles in which she memorably portrays caregivers both attentive and criminally negligent. In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Ryan costars as Ethan Hawke’s ex-wife Martha, working hard to raise her daughter with in arrears financial support from her ex-husband. In Gone Baby Gone, she plays Dorchester single mother Helene McCready, a white-trash junkie who endangers her 4-year-old first by taking her on a drug run and then, when she goes missing, by withholding key, germane details which may aid the police in her recovery.

In real life, Martha (as well as many others, rightly) would be appalled by Helene’s actions. Yet Ryan’s searing performance neither panders nor tips over into gaudy caricature. However bawdy the character, she plays Helene chiefly with an unapologetic self-involvement — the unblinking, under-educated victim of her own shattered childhood, who now knows no choices other than poor, self-indulgent or some combination thereof — and in doing so shines a light on the cyclical distress of America’s underclass, heartbreakingly chalking an evidentiary mark for the latter grouping in the age-old nature-nurture debate.”