Diversions >>

• Best Dog Park
  Martell Park
  You can dress her in a parka, crimp her fur, and keep her in your purse, but don't forget: Your dog is still an animal. A pack animal, and it's time to re-acquaint Princess with her long-forgotten species. The Martell dog park is a wedge of suffering grass in the middle of a severe cement... More >>
• Best Local Artists
  Friends with You
  Since tag-teaming in 2002 to form their Friends with You collective, Sam Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III have been on a tear to corner the globe with their vision of magic, luck, and friendship. The Miami-based conceptual duo started off creating a line of designer toys featuring a wacky cast of... More >>
• Best Art Gallery
  Gallery Diet
  As far as local dealers go, Nina Johnson has earned her spurs on the local scene as a tireless dynamo and community activist. Her gallery has become a favorite hub for art lovers searching for provocative exhibitions that linger in the mind long after one leaves her lively, shape-shifting space.... More >>
• Best Art Exhibit (1 Comment)
  "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967"
  This nearly pitch-perfect exhibition, organized by curator Dominic Molon over a five-year span, explored the deep-rooted and primal alliances between rebellious spirits haunting both the sonic and visual realms. It featured more than 100 paintings, drawings, installations, and videos by 56... More >>
• Best Website to Discover the Miami Art Scene
  wetheatproject.com
  Wet Heat offers an insightful take on a critical moment for our city and the cultural engine driving it. During the past 18 months, Bill Bilowit and Grela Orihuela, originators of the popular site, have been producing documentary content chronicling Miami's new identity as a global arts... More >>
• Best Barely Legal Art Blog (1 Comment)
  MSGCartel.com
  Miami has a graffiti style all its own — wild, imaginative, and full of tropical color. MSG Cartel claims it's only an "online exhibition" of graffiti, implying its contributors are simply admirers of that particular street art. But browse the site — named for graffiti crew Miami... More >>
• Best Place for Kids to Unleash Their Creativity
  Kenan-Flagler Family Discovery Gallery
  At the Frost's gorgeous new building, local kids finally have a place to channel their inner van Gogh or Warhol in a setting that invites creativity. This state-of-the-art gallery allows visitors to enjoy interactive activities designed to educate, entertain, and enhance the museum experience.... More >>
• Best Art Museum (2 Comments)
  Frost Art Museum
  The sparkling debut of Miami's first new museum in a decade was greeted with critical acclaim and thunderclaps of applause from the public when the Frost reopened its doors this past November. Designed by Yann Weymouth, the 46,000-square-foot building is a work of art that rivaled the impressive... More >>
• Best Museum
  Jewish Museum of Florida
  Did you know Florida's Jews have been kicking it old-school in the Sunshine State since 1763? With the Torah and the menorah and the dancing of the hora under swaying palm trees? No? Well, there's this nice Jewish lady over on the Beach... she or one of her helpful staff members will set you... More >>
• Best Theater for Drama
  New Theatre
  Once you get past the nightmarish parking, no venue prepares you as perfectly — aesthetically, gastronomically, or literarily — for two hours in the theater as Ricky J. Martinez's New Theatre. The lobby is small but smartly appointed: Good local art hangs on the walls, and as often... More >>
• Best Opera
  Leo Delibes's Lakme at Florida Grand Opera
  This is simple arithmetic. Even with a wooden leading man, Lakme gets by on the exoticism of its Indian setting and the decadent (but tuneful!) complexities of Leo Delibes's one great opera — the silly libretto of which makes a lot of opera people dismiss the whole thing. But those people... More >>
• Best Theatrical Production
  Neil LaBute's Some Girl(s) at the Mad Cat Theatre Company at the Light Box
  It pains the heart that for the second year in a row, our "Best Of" accolades are forced to compensate for the silliness of those other awards — the ones named after the sculptor. Yet again, Mad Cat Theatre did the most disturbing, artfully executed work of the year, and yet again the old... More >>
• Best Actor
  Meshaun Labrone Arnold
  Meshaun Labrone Arnold both wrote and starred in The Hate U Gave, but the piece had little of the self-indulgent flab most writer/actors can't bring themselves to shear from their own work. His acting and writing were wise, while his subject — and character — was just a savant: a man... More >>
• Best Actress
  Tie: Brandii Edwards, Carey Hart, and Carolyn Johnson
  Delta was a play with three leads, each of whom would briefly assume the role of Indesha Ida Mae Holland before passing it off to a costar. Those not playing Indesha in a given moment would play secondary characters — Indesha's mother, a gin-addled crank, a minister, the voice of God.... More >>
• Best Supporting Actor
  Paul Tei
  This writer has known Paul Tei, at least on a professional level, for almost three years. This writer has chatted with him in half a dozen theater lobbies, written half a dozen plays about his work, and has watched him star in at least as many shows. But when the tattooed, pierced, spiky-haired,... More >>
• Best Supporting Actress
  Lela Elam
  This award could easily have gone to a dozen other actors from Judas Iscariot, whose characters were as big, bright, and sharply drawn as only a three-hour play with an almost perfect cast can allow. But Lela Elam brought it with an intensity rare even for her (which is saying something), as she... More >>
• Best Acting Ensemble (2 Comments)
  Antonio Amadeo, John Manzelli, Ceci Fernandez, Ricky Waugh, Scott Genn, Bill Schwartz, and Todd Allen Durkin
  Betrayed was a play about the Iraqis who dreamed of American rescue long before the War on Terror, who loved the West and studied Emily Brontë and watched English-language porn, who were neither Baathists nor especially religious. They were (little-l) liberals, (little-d) democrats, and... More >>
• Best Director
  Joseph Adler
  Joseph Adler is a big personality with a big voice, big hair, and a big heart. So Adding Machine must have been quite a trick for him. The musical, composed in 2008 by Joshua Schmidt and written by Schmidt and Jason Loewith, is a modernist horror story based on Elmer Rice's nearly forgotten 1927... More >>
• Best Costume Design
  Ellis Tillman
  Costume quality, more than any other aspect of theater, is determined by money. If you've got a lot of it, you can dress your actors as cats, French aristocracy, Queen Elizabeth, or anything else. If you don't have any, you dress them in corduroy and denim. So let's take a moment to praise a... More >>
• Best Set Design
  The Naked Stage and friends for Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis and others
  You've had meals that cost more than the average Naked Stage set, yet this little theater somehow crams more mojo, authenticity, and oozy-walled atmosphere into its sets than any ten super-expensive shows at (name of shitty theater on Miracle Mile deleted by editor). Maybe it's because the room... More >>
• Best New Play
  George Packer's Betrayed at GableStage at the Biltmore
  OK, so Betrayed wasn't completely new when it opened at Joe Adler's GableStage. But it still had that new-play smell. George Packer is probably the best writer The New Yorker has had in a decade or more, and his 2007 article about the Iraqi translators who teamed up with American forces after... More >>
• Best Musical
  Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith's Adding Machine at GableStage at the Biltmore
  Art communicates first to the heart and then climbs its way to the brain on a ladder of associations — memories, snippets of things once seen or heard, allusions to the past. No recent musical has used association so evocatively as Adding Machine. In it, the industrial U-turned dystopia of... More >>
• Best Film Festival (1 Comment)
  Miami Jewish Film Festival
  Just like the Buffalo Bills, no one circles the wagons like the Jews if, of course, those wagons happen to be filled with reels of film. Tapping into a rich tradition of narrative, political awareness, and commentary, Jewish film is a cut above the other arbitrary category distinctions film... More >>
• Best Movie Shot on Location
  Bart Got a Room
  The world can take only so many "quirky" teenage indie comedies. Personally, we had enough with that cringe-worthy line, "This is one doodle that can't be undid, homeskillet," from Juno. But we'll make an exception for Bart Got a Room, a charming comedy about Danny Stein (played by Steven... More >>
• Best Book by a Local Author
  Washington Burning, by Les Standiford
  Remember when the British were our primary foreign policy problem? It's amazing to think that Elton John and company once had the sack (pun alert!) to burn down the White House, especially since they've spent the past eight years playing Flavor Flav to George Bush's Public Enemy #1. (Their only... More >>
• Best Local Writer
  Russell Banks
  Most people don't know that Russell Banks, the John Dos Passos Award-winning author of famously cold-weather novels such as Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, spends half his year in South Beach. But unlike most snowbirds, Banks is very active in Miami's literary life. As a board member of... More >>
• Best Local Poet
  Denise Duhamel
  If you haven't heard of Denise Duhamel, a professor at Florida International University and author of eight poetry collections, it's probably because you think contemporary poetry sounds only like this: "Evening storm/Snow hammers the glass/Surface of the house where we fell/In and out of love,... More >>
• Best TV Show Shot in Miami (1 Comment)
  Burn Notice
  Surf. Sun. Espionage. It's an apt description for the sexiest show on television. Jeffrey Donovan plays blacklisted ex-spy Michael Westen. Cool, sophisticated, and blessed with the knowledge to make bombs and GPS devices out of household items, Westen is part Sean Connery James Bond, part... More >>
• Best TV News Anchor (1 Comment)
  Joel Connable
  Just three days after taking over for 23-year veteran Tony Segreto on the 6 p.m. broadcast, Joel Connable stood before a green screen doing what even national squawk boxers failed to: clearly explain the situation involving US Airways Flight 1549’s descent into the Hudson River. Connable had one... More >>
• Best TV News Reporter
  Qwesi "Q." McCray
  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My remote can reach, even out of sight For it's likely under the beige-gray couch. I love thee at the level of volume To hear thee giggle at thy flubs sweetly. I love thee free, for thy Murrow... More >>
• Best Sportscaster (1 Comment)
  Kim Bokamper
  Spectate and study as much as you like, but only a player truly knows the game. And Kim Bokamper — former first-round NFL draft pick, Dolphins linebacker from 1977 to 1985, and Pro Bowler — is a man with a surplus of on-field experience. So it was simple logic that led him, following... More >>
• Best FM Radio Personality
  DJ Laz
  Yeah, y'all know him. He's Miami's ole-school pimp. The one with the limp. It's that Cuban-American chico, DJ Laz. The 37-year-old music producer and morning radio-show host has been representing the 305's signature booty bass sound since 1990, when it first busted out on the scene. Like the... More >>
• Best AM Radio Personality (3 Comments)
  Bishop Victor T. Curry
  As one of Miami's most influential African-American leaders, Bishop Victor T. Curry has his hands full promoting the interests of his flock and tending to his parochial empire. However, he still sets aside time every day to directly interact with his followers as host of the Morning Glory Show,... More >>
• Best Local Website
  Talk Nightlife
  With the city's constant influx and departure of nightclubs and promoters, it's difficult to keep up with the fast-paced scene. In comes Talk Nightlife, which broke off from rival CoolJunkie when former site partner Ryan Porter and forum moderator Dan Vidal joined forces. Though Talk Nightlife's... More >>
• Best Blog
  The South Florida Watershed Journal
  What happens out in the Glades... well, ends up in South Florida's faucets and sewers. Following the ups and downs of the water table that feeds Miami is key to understanding bizarre concepts such as "why you still can't legally water your lawn even though it's been raining for a month... More >>
• Best Local YouTube Performance
  "Sweet Home Hialeah" by Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero
  We could explain why this video is so funny, but it's better to just let local poet and Hialeah native Yaddyra Peralta guide you through the entire thing: "Okay, when it starts, the guy's wearing a fat gold chain and hanging out with chongas — the gangsta-looking girls with tight clothes... More >>
• Best Dolphins Player
  Chad Pennington
  It was fate that brought Chad Pennington and the Miami Dolphins together. During the off-season, the New York Jets waived Pennington after four solid seasons with the team, casting him aside like an old tire to make room for newly acquired Brett Favre. Yet when the Dolphins signed Pennington off... More >>
• Best Local Sports Coach
  Tony Sparano
  Miami Dolphins fans haven't had much to cheer about since Don Shula hung up the clipboard. The list of coaches to patrol the sidelines has looked like this, in descending date and professional football coaching ability: Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, Jim Bates, Nick Saban, and Cam Cameron. When... More >>
• Best Heat Player
  Mario Chalmers
  Obviously, there's only one answer to this category, but if we say, "Dwyane Wade," what else do we write? And no disrespect to Michael Beasley, who, despite not being the instant double-double machine he was promised to be, has at least shown the rare ability to go into an NBA Jam-like "He's... More >>
• Best Trade (Sports Team)
  Heat Trade Shawn Marion to the Toronto Raptors for Jermaine O'Neal and Jamario Moon
  This is Miami, son. So it makes sense that the best trade pulled off by any team in the 305 this year was all about the cash money. Don't misunderstand — Jermaine O'Neal is not a bad guy to have banging bodies under the glass, especially on a team that has started everyone but the ghost of... More >>
• Best Marlins Player
  Jorge Cantu
  No, Jorge Cantu isn’t the most talented guy, and he’s not going to put up the best numbers. He’s not showy, and he’s damn sure not pretty. Cantu is just clutch. And guts. Last season, he rapped so many big hits in late innings that a lot of Marlins fans began calling him “Can-do.” Most of them... More >>
• Best Marlins Player
  Jorge Cantu
  No, Jorge Cantu isn’t the most talented guy, and he’s not going to put up the best numbers. He’s not showy, and he’s damn sure not pretty. Cantu is just clutch. And guts. Last season, he rapped so many big hits in late innings that a lot of Marlins fans began calling him “Can-do.” Most of them... More >>
• Best Hurricanes Player
  Jack McClinton
  Coming out of Calvert Hall High in Baltimore, Jack McClinton was never seen as a hard-court star, let alone a guy who could put a football school on the basketball map. McClinton applied to every college in the ACC and was roundly rejected by all of them. So when the young man decided he wanted... More >>
• Best Marlins Player
  Jorge Cantu
  No, Jorge Cantu isn’t the most talented guy, and he’s not going to put up the best numbers. He’s not showy, and he’s damn sure not pretty. Cantu is just clutch. And guts. Last season, he rapped so many big hits in late innings that a lot of Marlins fans began calling him “Can-do.” Most of them... More >>
• Best Panthers Player
  Goalie Tomas Vokoun
  It's Saturday night, the league-leading Boston Bruins are skating in Sunrise, and as shot after shot after wicked shot ricochets off the Panthers goalie, the BankAtlantic Center shakes louder and louder each time the distorted chords from Blur's "Song 2" cue up: Blur: When I feel heavy... More >>
• Best Local Boxer
  Glen Johnson
  Boxing is a sport as much about entertainment as it is about fighting, which is the real reason Muhammad Ali is considered the greatest of all time. Some fighters have the charisma and story line that make people queue up to watch them in the ring, and others simply go to work. Glen Johnson is... More >>
• Best Mixed Martial Arts Debut
  Wiber "The Hulk" Marrero
  Wiber Marrero, who is a personal trainer at Intense Warehouse Fitness in Kendall, popped his MMA cherry last December at the American Airlines Arena during the Mixed Fighting Alliance's There Will Be Blood promotion. The former Army Ranger, who boasts black belts in jujitsu and kickboxing,... More >>
• Best Basketball Court
  Flamingo Park
  Every basketball court has its own personality. There's the court filled with dudes who call a foul if you so much as breathe on them, the court with the And 1 wannabes, the court with the old men with knee braces who shoot inexplicably well from beyond the three-point line, the court that tears... More >>
• Best Public Tennis Courts (1 Comment)
  Surfside Tennis Center
  Like sister pastimes golf, polo, and hedge fund fraud, tennis has always been rank with the stink of exclusivity. But although guys named Nigel who tie their sweaters around their necks usually play tennis, once you take the sport out of the country club, it can be as accessible as a game of... More >>
• Best Day Trip
  Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop
  I once knew a girl from Calcutta Whose breath stunk like old dookie butta. Her brother loved booze And getting tattoos And he needed a new pair of shoes. Their neighbor, the chef on a mission Needed shiny new gear for his kitchen. They lived down in Dade, Where they worked every... More >>
• Best Picnic Spot
  Black Point Marina
  A sea cow pokes its snout above the surface as is traverses the waters along the 1.5-mile jetty that juts from Black Point Marina to Biscayne Bay. Manatees are just one of the wondrous sights to encounter at the county-owned dock and park where couples and families spread blankets on the grassy... More >>
• Best Place to Use Bug Spray
  Gator hunt in the Everglades
  It's early September, the height of alligator-hunting season in Florida. A midnight blue Ford F-150 hauling an airboat kicks up dust as it veers off the Tamiami Trail, just west of the Miccosukee casino, and onto an uneven dirt road. The truck's headlights cut through the pitch-black thicket,... More >>
• Best Place to Hike
  Shark Valley
  OK, smart guy, with your white-boy dreadlocks and stickered-up Nalgene bottle hanging off of your carabiner, let's just get this out of the way: Miami is to hard-core hiking as Aspen is to serious scuba diving. We get it. If you're looking to tackle a totally wicked 5.6-grade slope, hop the next... More >>
• Best Place to Mountain-Bike or Kayak
  Oleta River State Park
  The Oleta River is close enough to get to yet distant enough that it's pretty much the best place around to do outdoor activities such as mountain biking and kayaking. Sure, mountain biking in Florida is a lot like sunbathing in Antarctica: Nature won't quite permit it. Florida's landscape may... More >>
• Best Urban Bike Ride
  Venetian Way
  So there you are: rolling past the traffic jams, stores blasting techno music, and moms with strollers. You're biking and you're happy, damn it. And then — inevitably — it happens: Some flashy douchebag in a convertible cuts you off, reminding you why Miami can't shake its reputation... More >>
• Best Rural Bike Ride
  From Hobie Beach to the southern tip of Bill Baggs State Park and back
  OK, so there are few moments on this route when you can't see high-rises, and it includes a street called Sewage Plant Road. In Miami, rural is a fuzzy term, and this beginner-friendly bike ride will allow you to escape the urban bustle, clear your head, take in some beautiful views, and maybe... More >>
• Best Place to Jog
  Biscayne Boulevard from NE 36th Street to the Brickell Avenue Bridge
  Your weathered Nike cross-trainers bounce off the broken concrete along a two-mile stretch of battered sidewalk. Your heart beats rapidly, you take deep breaths, and your legs churn hard as you race along vestiges of Miami's past and future. Old structures such as the Bacardi buildings hark back... More >>
• Best Leisure Activity Other than Clubs or Movies
  The Flying Trapeze School
  Gravity has been threatening your chances of coasting away into the skies forever, meaning kissing the clouds and tasting the air that only birds breathe have all been relegated to moments in your dreams, or while on psychedelics. But there is a place in Miami where you can fly without tripping... More >>
• Best Public Park
  Arch Creek Park
  Contrary to popular belief, not every sacred place in Miami-Dade has been paved, flipped, or foreclosed on. Just off Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami is Arch Creek Park. Named for a limestone arch on the site, these eight acres of natural and historic preserve have attracted people for... More >>
• Best Beach
  Bal Harbour
  A beach is a beach is a beach, but don't tell that to half the people who frequent some of Miami's more popular shoreline. There's the beach meant for showing off your latest gym/elective surgery achievements in the tiniest spandex. There's the beach for families with six kids all in water... More >>
• Best Place to Go Stoned
  Coral Castle
  Have you ever spun a nine-ton coral rock gate with one finger? Do it on weed. Super-genius Ed Leedskalnin drilled a perfect eight-foot hole through an 18,000-pound block he moved by himself from Florida City to Homestead; then he centered and balanced it on an iron shaft and truck bearing just... More >>
• Best Escape from Reality
  The Kundalini Journey at the Mandarin Oriental
  Everything about going to the Mandarin Oriental feels exotic and otherworldly. It begins when you drive over the Brickell Key Bridge. Lapping waves, expensive cars, uniformed valets, and security guards are everywhere you look — it ain't hard to tell you're visiting an oasis of luxury,... More >>
• Best Not-So-Cheap Thrill
  Couples' Oceanfront Massage at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne
  It's tough to choose 'cause they're so damn... ritzy. But if pressed, we'd have to admit the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne is our favorite of the hotel chain's South Florida locations. That's in no small part because of the spa, which is as plush and visually pleasing as one might imagine the... More >>
• Best Activity While Intoxicated
  Insomnia Fridays at 90 Degree
  Once the clock sails past midnight, the downtown crowd couldn't care less about what other party sets (i.e., stodgy SoBe and boring Brickell) would deem PC. And once it's after 4 a.m., everyone is so wasted that Barack Obama could walk into the club and no one would flinch. Well, maybe they'd... More >>
• Best Place to Throw a Party (1 Comment)
  Charcoal Studio
  Poplife, Gen Art, and even the New Times have hosted parties here. Why? With retro knickknacks, an AstroTurf patio floor, and an indoor swimming pool and hot tub, it feels more like partying at your friend's awesome warehouse-style loft than an actual production studio, which might be because... More >>
• Best Spanish Classes (1 Comment)
  University of Miami Intensive Language Institute
  At a Cuban café, you attempt to order a steamed-milk espresso and you get a meat-filled pastry instead. When an irate driver on I-95 suggests you fellate your cousin, you smile bewilderedly and give a thumbs-up. And at work, the Colombian fellow in the next cubicle always seems to pull... More >>
• Best Drag Queen (2 Comments)
  Joanna Mills
  You might know this feisty, self-deprecating broad from '60s rock cover band Guerilla Balls, featuring Miami Beach's legendary boy-in-dress Shelley Novak. Or — more likely — you don't. But if the finest queen should be judged by the campiest one-liners, funniest/frizziest blond wig,... More >>