Watch Tiffany Haddish Teach Us How to Make an Unforgettable Awards Show Speech

Last night, Girls Trip star and national treasure Tiffany Haddish accepted the prize for Best Supporting Actress at the New York Film Critics Circle awards. Upon receiving the award Haddish gave a 17-minute acceptance speech. For anyone else, it would be insanely self-indulgent; for Haddish, it was almost not enough.

After making sure her name was spelled right on the award, Haddish launched into the speech, touching on critics, friendship, and being seen:

I know some people in here are going to talk shit about me. It’s OK. You know why it’s OK? Because you care enough to say something. If you didn’t say nothing, then you didn’t care. So if you said something, thank you. I don’t care if it’s positive or negative. I appreciate you. I’m glad you see me. Cause there were so many years nobody saw me.

You know when you’re a little kid going through the system, you wonder, “Does anyone even know I’m alive?” And to be this example to youth. There are so many people like me that you guys have no clue about. But they coming, cause I kicked the fucking door open.

And here’s another heartfelt quote about the connections she built on set and how that helped her performance:

This whole business is all about how you feel, what feeling you put out to the world, and how you make other people feel. When you feel good about what you doing, in my mind, it makes other people feel good. On set, working with Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Regina Hall, and them allowing me to be myself… They were like, keep going. Queen Latifah would egg me on to do the craziest stuff. And I was like, She gotta be my friend in real life cause we’ll never go jail! And she is my friend in real life and we haven’t been in jail yet.

It seems like the whole night was about Haddish anyway. She got shoutouts from Best Actor recipient Timothée Chalamet, special honoree Molly Haskell, and a very special tribute from Paul Thomas Anderson (who won Best Screenplay for Phantom Thread) via Lesley Manville, who read out his phone number to the room. It’s Haddish’s world and we’re just living in it.