Best Picture Winner Moonlight Is a Window Into Floridas Past
Though the awards-presentation mishap that capped Sunday night's Oscars broadcast may garner much of the attention when it comes to the Academy's recognition of Moonlight as 2016's Best Picture, this film also deserves a second look from a historical perspective. After all, Best Supporting Actor Mahershala Ali wasn't the only supporting character needed to make the film work Liberty City, one of Miami's black and impoverished neighborhoods, is another protagonist in the Moonlight story. This treatment of Miami has been a long time coming. For decades, audiences have had a fairly myopic and often cartoonish view of life in the city, exemplified by crime-focused stories like 1983's Scarface, the television show Miami Vice, the Bad Boys film series and the video game series Grand Theft Auto particularly Vice City'. Other stories, such as TV's Nip/Tuck, highlighted the city's glitz and glamor albeit, often the grittier side of this constructed fantasy world to the detriment, if not entire erasure, of the multidimensional worlds of those living in the city's margins.