Da’Vine Joy Randolph is on the hunt for a few more tickets to the Oscars. “They’re telling me I may only have one extra ticket, so that’s my mission,” the Holdovers star tells me. “Can you imagine the people in your life that are, like, ‘I want to come!’ And you’re, like, ‘And you should come because you’ve helped me significantly in my life.’” The first-time nominee shares this conundrum on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below) with both firm conviction and good humor—after all, this is a moment that doesn’t come around even once for most in her profession. “If I can get five—I don’t care if my people are back there [on the balcony], I don’t need five people in my row,” she says. “Get Oscar tickets, or buy Oscar tickets, whatever we’ve got to do—I have some family members that would be very upset, so I’ve got to figure that out.”

Call it a new kind of problem for Randolph, a Tony nominee turned Hollywood utility player now on the cusp of Oscar gold. (She’s already won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for best supporting actress.) Her turn in The Holdovers as Mary Lamb—cafeteria manager of the boarding school where she, classics teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), and misanthropic student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) get holed up together during the Christmas break—showcases deft range. Randolph somehow serves as both the film’s comic relief, mediating tense standoffs between the two men, and its tragic heart. As Mary grieves the death of her son over the lonely holiday, Randolph’s work is devastating—bringing an emotional depth that allows The Holdovers’ explorations of connection and kindness to land all the more potently.

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The role was awards-tipped the moment The Holdovers bowed in Telluride over Labor Day, during the SAG-AFTRA strike. The film is distributed by Focus Features, the specialty studio under Universal’s umbrella, which meant the cast did not complete any promotion until the studios and the guild reached an agreement more than two months later. Randolph was thrust into the campaigning machine at that point, racing between interviews and red carpets and tastemaker events, and hasn’t stopped since.

The closer she gets to the actual Oscars, the more she thinks back to her childhood watching the show every year with her family. “The Oscars were like the Olympics…I remember that as a kid being, like, ‘Wow, this is everything to these people’—which is so unique, especially, as you start to experience it,” she says. “All of this is very out-of-body. None of this stuff has processed.”

It can be easy to get swept up in the circus. There’s so much noise around you, you’re meeting so many people, your work is being recognized like never before. Randolph’s presence on the trail, though, has stood out for its authenticity. “I’m just trying to be true to myself,” she says. This goes even for the acceptance speeches. Randolph has already delivered a few on national television, writing each out in advance. She’ll start thinking about the speech’s shape while on the plane ride over to the show, the “forced timeout” of being tens of thousands of feet up in the air. Then she writes it out while in hair and makeup, just before hitting the red carpet. “It feels raw—doing it any other time just doesn’t hit the same way,” she says.

Randolph approaches this part of the season as she does everything else: considered, careful, openhearted. “It’s a wild thing to be sitting there and then people are screaming and yelling and clapping and cheering—it’s one of the most beautiful sounds, but it can be intimidating, it can be overwhelming, and then you have to calm your nervous system and go up there and deliver this beautiful speech,” Randolph says. “It’s an intense feeling. You just try to steady yourself in the midst of it.” So far, she’s done a pretty good job of that.