Supporting actor, drama: Alan Cumming, The Good Wife (CBS); Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones (HBO); Walton Goggins, Justified (FX); Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad (AMC); Vincent Kartheiser, Mad Men (AMC); Alexander Skarsgard, True Blood (HBO)

Talk about your nearly impossible choices. As easy as it is to defend this list, it would be equally easy to defend one assembled from John Noble (Fringe), Neal McDonough (Justified), John Slattery (Mad Men), Andre Braugher (Men of a Certain Age), Billy Campbell (The Killing) and Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad). And we haven’t even mentioned Robert Carlyle (Once Upon a Time), Josh Charles (The Good Wife), Nelsan Ellis (True Blood) or John Scurti (Rescue Me).
Still, choices must be made, and the original choices offer a wide range of admirable performances. That includes the incredibly adept and amusing dual-personality turn from Skarsgard, even though he’s unlikely to be nominated because voters up to now have shown virtually no interest in True Blood.