Shonda Rhimes gave a heartfelt and funny speech upon accepting her Laurel Lifetime Achievement Award, and here's the speech in most of its entirety:

"Maybe you guys giving me the Lifetime Achievement Award is a very nice, very polite way of asking me to stop. Because maybe Thursday night is enough. But I'm going to take it as encouragement because I've only been doing television for 12 years, and that kind of means I'm not even a teenager yet. The wonder is still there for me. I'm not cynical. I continue to be amazed that there is still a job that I get to make stuff up for a living. And then film the stuff that I make up for a living. And it goes on television!" She went on to add that "the best part of writing and creating television for me is the other writers. The community of writers that we have when a show comes to life…the very dark and twisty writers rooms that we have. The writers are the best and make me look good. I want to thank every actor from every show. I want to thank everyone in Shondaland. I want to thank everyone in Shondaland for not pointing out how egotistical it is to call it Shondaland! [Laughs] I want to thank Scott Foley for his graciousness, his talent, and his abs. [Laughs] I want to thank my incredible family and my daughters Harper, Emerson, and Beckett for giving me a reason to wake up every morning and smile. And I want to thank ABC and ABC Studios for the years of wonderful creative collaboration and the amazing canvas they've given me for which to paint, and for putting money on top of everything. And I want to thank all of you. This is crazy. I never really thought that the world outside should look like…the world inside of television should look like the world outside would be something special. And it feels sort of crazy to me that other people do. The idea that we should normalize television and make it look like the world you see when you go to the grocery store shouldn't be revolutionary, and the fact that it is still that way, that we're sort of dragging television into a place that it should have been at least 40 years ago is a problem, and it's sad, but we're getting there."

Writers Guild Awards West president Chris Keyser presented the Guild's Valentine Davies Award to Academy Award-winning filmmaker/advocate Ben Affleck for his humanitarian efforts.

Born Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt, Affleck spoke about how he got his middle name. "My parents named me after a Hungarian friend of theirs named Geza. Now when I got to be in fourth or fifth grade, I accused them of being the worst namers in the world! I said, Everyone calls me Ben Gay!' But she told me that Geza was a friend of hers who died right around the time I was born, who was a Holocaust survivor in Hungary and the most exceptional person she knew. He had left from a train during the Holocaust taking Jews to death camps, and he went back and saved several others returning to break them out. She told me six million Jews were murdered and that men like him were brave and selfless. That name has never been short of a tremendous honor to me since that day."

Of course, no awards show is complete these days without a gifting suite, and Backstage Creations was on hand to award the presenters and winners with some pretty exceptional swag (but don't worry...a lot was auctioned off for charity too!). Some of the goodies included Christy Whitman's new book, The Art of Having It All: A Woman's Guide to Unlimited Abundance; Jesse Tyler Ferguson's Tie The Knot for The Tie Bar, LG Electronic's sleek LG Tone UltraTM headphones, Royal Wine's Los Arango Tequila, Eagle Creek luggage from The Container Store, At-a-Glance, whimsical coasters from Invitation Consultants, Johnson's Popcorn from Ocean City, N.J., Justin's Organic Peanut Butter Cups, Linwoods Health Foods, and a three-month membership to SoCal Hot Yoga. This year's celeb retreat was created and styled by Josh Johnson, Interior and Event Designs.