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• Best Gallery Hangout

  The Bubble

  In the past decade or so, we've been inundated with bubbles: the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, Michael Jackson's chimp Bubbles. After all these messes, the term stopped conjuring up images of that beloved bathing staple Mr. Bubble and became synonymous with the plundering of your 401-K. Luckily, longtime promoters/power couple Garo Gallo and Yvonne Colón… More >>

• Best Theater Season

  The Caldwell Theatre - CLOSED

  It's definite: The Caldwell is fusty no more. Its last season, helmed by new Executive Artistic Director Clive Cholerton, was powerful, varied, and risky. He took some knocks for that, of course — nobody much liked The Old Man and the Sea, which in retrospect probably didn't need to be turned into a play — but mostly, the word among… More >>

• Best Set Design

  Richard Crowell, Two Jews Walk Into a War, Florida Stage - CLOSED

  The set for Two Jews Walk Into a War was a painterly representation of a crumbling synagogue in Kabul, which happened to be inhabited by the last two Jews in the country of Afghanistan. You could sense that a lot of love went into the place before it became an object of anti-Jewish target practice. It was full of warm… More >>

• Best Rock Band

  Alexander

  God bless Alexander. Not just because the Fort Lauderdale indie-rock group's charismatic frontman, Ryan Alexander, inserts his passionate religious beliefs and stances regarding poverty, politics, and the human condition into the lyrics. There's a dedication to songcraft here that can thread together neatly like Death Cab for Cutie on record but will turn around and chomp up the stage when… More >>
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  Best Reunited Band

  Blond Fuzz (formerly Stonefox)

  Stonefox vocalist Jordan Asher Cruz and bassist Ross Fuentes headed to New York in February, and with them, the blues-infused racket that was their trademark left town too. A whole lot of sweat-soaked and beer-coated warehouse floors went dry, and even more lusty South Florida hearts became famished. In late May, Cruz, guitarist Dave Barnard, and drummer Jeff Rose officially… More >>

• Best Art Event

  "Abracadabra: Third Annual Fund-Raising Art Exhibition and Raffle,"Art and Culture Center of Hollywood

  When is barely controlled chaos a good thing? When it's in the service of a happening as inspired and inventive as "Abracadabra." The good folks at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood put the "fun" in fundraising with this event. It all starts with the largess of a hundred or so local artists who donate works that are then… More >>

• Best Supporting Actress

  Miriam Wiener, In a Dark, Dark House, The Mosaic Theatre - CLOSED

  Adolescents aren't what they show you in the movies. They aren't trendy girls full of self-confidence or dour baby-faced sages, scuffing their feet and dispensing unspoilt Rousseauist wisdom. Actually, they are painfully dishonest, profoundly uncomfortable little weasels completely preoccupied with proving to the rest of us that they're more worldly than they are. Wiener's performance captured this completely. Playing a… More >>

• Best Musical Director

  Jon Rose

  Vices could easily have suffered from too-many-cooks syndrome. It was written by four songwriters, who, judging by the sound of things, had never so much as been in a room with one another. Their contributions, which ranged from cabaret-style joke songs to torchy laments to creepy balladeering, were hammered together into a seamless (but weird) whole by director Jon Rose,… More >>

• Best Female Rock Vocalist

  Flees' Elyse Perez

  After you hear a true punk frontwoman with this much intensity, it's impossible to go back to Paramore-quality frontwoman punk. Flees' lead singer/screecher Elyse Perez has all of the weapons of a Chrissie Hynde, a Kathleen Hanna, and even an Iggy Pop packed into her holster of a larynx. From the versatility of this South Floridian's pipes, she could probably… More >>
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  Best New Electronica Artist

  MillionYoung

  MillionYoung's (AKA Mike Diaz) practically put the chill in chillwave with his billowy, midtempo electronica infused with distant vocals. This musical laptop wünderkind from Coral Springs has garnered many favorable reviews, and there's little doubt why after hearing his dreamy, tropical reworking of Mary Tyler Moore's theme "Love Is All Around." And considering Diaz's bookings this year — opening for… More >>

• Best Duo Exhibition

  "Recent Works 09: Drawings, Paintings, Digital, Sculpture,"Mark K. Wheeler Gallery

  In some parallel universe, Jon Hunt and Jim Radford might be brothers — so alike and yet so different. In the real world, however, the family they share is the Art Institute, where Hunt currently teaches and where Radford taught not so long ago. Both traffic in a sort of cracked realism, although each puts such a different spin on… More >>

• Best Supporting Actor

  Gordon McConnell, Rock 'n' Roll, The Mosaic Theatre - CLOSED

  There's an anger shared among old Communists — over their own blindness, over the hideous betrayals of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot — that Gordon McConnell, as an aging and embittered English Marxist, captured perfectly. McConnell's rage seemed queerly particular: More in the way he glanced around the room than in anything he said. He seemed most of all… More >>

• Best Musical

  Vices: A Love Story - CLOSED

  What we like about musicals is the music. What we don't like so much is all the silliness that so often accompanies it. The too-big emotions. The absence of character development or subtlety. The bombast. Well, Vices had none of that shit. It was all brilliant, catchy music with lyrics that were in turn moving, mysterious, creepy, and funny, tied… More >>
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  Best Male Rock Vocalist

  Mike Mineo

  The vocal chops Delray Beach's Mike Mineo showcases on his debut album of eclectic pop, Eccentricity, almost make "blue-eyed soul" sound like an insult. First of all, Mineo's eyes are far too chestnut brown for that kind of comparison to pan out. Much like R&B revisionist Jamie Lidell, nothing Mineo does with his voice is completely rooted in the Stax… More >>

• Best Exhibition Title

  "Balbone Martinez: Speaking in Parables Will Get You Nowhere With This Crowd,"Art and Culture Center of Hollywood

  The title of this tiny show, which was shoehorned into the Art and Culture Center's smallest display space, is a nifty inside joke that works on multiple levels. First, there's no such artist as Balbone Martinez — the moniker melds the names of collaborators Michael Balbone and Emily Martinez. Then there's the subject matter of several of the works, which… More >>

• Best New Play

  Vices, a Love Story The Caldwell Theatre - CLOSED

  Brash, ballsy, tuneful, and strange, the musical called Vices rolled back the years at the once-fusty old Caldwell Theatre and made it young again. It was written by a whole flock of songwriters: Michael Heitzman, Ilene Reid, Everett Bradley, and Susan Draus, from a book by Heitzman and Reid. They took on the loose theme of, you know, "vices." The… More >>

• Best Dinner Theater

  Laffing Matterz

  So — Laffing Matterz didn't face much competition for this commendation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't kick ass. One of a dozen extremely competent servers brings you a very-decent three-course meal, and then the whole wait staff mounts the stage for 90 minutes of raucous, topical song and dance that is politically acute and naughty enough to make the… More >>
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  Best Hip-Hop Artist

  Schife

  Always hustling, West Palm Beach's Schife and production partner OhZee have left an imprint on most of South Florida's major hip-hop albums released during the past two years. Rick Ross, Trina, DJ Khaled, and Trick Daddy have all employed Schife's machine-gun snares, booming bass, and insipid keyboard lines. On top of that, Schife can write a booth-clearing hook, and with… More >>
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  Best Group Exhibition

  "Set to Manual" at Girls' Club

  There are those who complain that art in the postmodern world is too often soulless and mechanical. Then there are those who offer alternatives. Fortunately, the women who run the 4-year-old Girls' Club fall into the latter camp, as demonstrated by this smart, sassy show featuring such "name" artists as Tara Donovan, Annette Messager, Beatriz Monteavaro, Gean Moreno, Carol Prusa,… More >>

• Best Ensemble Cast

  Colin McPhillamy, Christopher Oden, and Elizabeth Dimon Copenhagen, Palm Beach Dramaworks

  The three great actors of Copenhagen were not meant to play people, exactly, but rather their shades: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, meeting in a hazy afterlife and trying to reconstruct what may or may not have happened on a particular night in 1941. Bohr and Heisenberg were quantum physicists, and the models for this play's performances… More >>

• Best Museum Curator

  Wendy M. Blazier,Boca Raton Museum of Art

  Curating art exhibitions can seem like thankless work. Not only do curators have to deal with the artists themselves, who are often sensitive and sometimes downright temperamental, but they also have to work with museum directors, a notoriously driven lot with, shall we say, healthy egos. As senior curator at the Boca Museum, where she has been since 1997, Wendy… More >>

• Best Live Band

  Community Property

  Only a hard-working band like Community Property is built to snag two Battle of the Bands victories in one day. On a fateful day in late March, led by ferocious frontman Lucian, this rock and soul quartet ran circles around its competition first at the Seminole Casino's Classic Spring Block Party, then at New Times' own musical brawl. Muscular beyond… More >>
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  Best Solo Exhibition

  "An Unfinished Conversation: Collecting Enrique Martínez Celaya," Boca Raton Museum of Art

  Just last year, we were welcoming Enrique Martínez Celaya back to South Florida, the artist having decamped from his Delray Beach studio a year earlier and moved back to Los Angeles. But who would have guessed that the itinerant painter, philosopher, photographer, poet, and publisher — he was born in Cuba, grew up in Spain and Puerto Rico, teaches in… More >>

• Best Director

  J. Barry Lewis, Copenhagen, Palm Beach Dramaworks

  Copenhagen is a play about quantum mechanics. At least, it is a play about the way one aspect of quantum mechanics, called "quantum indeterminacy," mirrors our understanding of history. In particular, it's about our understanding of one weird night in 1941 when Nazi scientist Werner Heisenberg visited his old friend, Niels Bohr, to talk about the Nazi plan to build… More >>
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  Best Album

  Surfer Blood's Astro Coast

  After self-released versions of Astro Coast floated around late last year, Surfer Blood's statement got solid with an official release via Kanine Records in January. Aside from its nationwide acclaim (and inevitable backlash), Astro Coast holds up when viewed through the lens of South Florida's beach-resort culture. "Swim (To Reach the End)" turns JP Pitts' voice into an invigorating hurricane.… More >>
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  Best Metal Band

  Murderous Rampage

  Rumor has it that the devil grew a third horn after hearing this Fort Lauderdale outfit's song titled "Eating Drinking Shitting." Frontman Tom Rampage, who cultivates a serious following as bartender at the Poor House in downtown Fort Lauderdale (see more on this below), bellows with such force that any mullets within 1,000 feet start flapping uncontrollably. "Fuck you, motherfucker"… More >>
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  Best Art Gallery

  Gallery 721

  Where would you turn if you wanted, say, one of the largest selections anywhere of work by the South Florida-based outsider artist Purvis Young? What if you were out to build a collection of posters from every Elvis movie ever made? Who might supply you with autographed Beatles memorabilia or original tickets from Woodstock? Believe it or not, there's a… More >>

• Best Actress

  Margery Lowe, At Home at the Zoo, Palm Beach Dramaworks

  There was an amused look that Marjorie Lowe wore throughout her one-act performance as Anne, the wife of Jerry — a character well-known to fans of the original Albee Play, Zoo Story, of which At Home is an expansion. She was exasperated with Jerry and even went through the motions of fighting with him — but she didn't really fight… More >>
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  Best Country Band

  Boise Bob and His Backyard Band

  Hallandale Beach's Boise Bob is twangin' about a revolution. And unlike Toby Keith, this type of rebellion is several states outside of the Nashville system. Not content to let his toe-tapping, old-time swamp music roll past without an impact, Boise Bob has social politics on his mind that will be on yours if you give a listen. The raw edges… More >>

• Best Music Festival

  SunFest

  SunFest has literally been doing it longer than Lollapalooza, and it's easy to see why. Every spring since 1982, the West Palm Beach waterfront comes alive with a 280,000-strong, music-filled party that's built on solid-enough business practices to keep it going for years to come. The 2010 lineup, which featured genre-busters like Weezer, Nas, Damian Marley, Sean Kingston, the B-52's,… More >>

• Best Art Museum

  Norton Museum of Art

  Since its 1941 opening, the museum has grown dramatically, more than doubling its size with one expansion, completed in 1997, and adding 75 percent more gallery space with another expansion a mere half-dozen years later. The museum now encompasses 122,500 square feet. The collection has grown commensurately, so that it's now up to more than 7,000 works, with substantial holdings… More >>

• Best Actor

  Gregg Weiner, Dumb Show, The Promethean Theatre

  Gregg Weiner was a goddamned fireball in Dumb Show, frying the eyebrows off his audience every night. As a drunken, drug-addicted, philandering actor who's been suckered by two yellow journalists into revealing every vile little thing he's ever done, Weiner was a jitterbugging mass of frayed nerves and wild, mammalian survival instincts. He tore around the stage like a nihilistic… More >>
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  Best Soul Artist

  Clarence Reid

  Clarence Reid's soulful side is hidden somewhere under that supervillain mask he wears as X-rated rapper Blowfly. When he wasn't composing some of the dirtiest raps known to man back in the '70s, Reid could turn on the charm and play his voice like a horn in Miles Davis' grasp. Even through his current thick rasp, the fella who created… More >>
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  Best Tribute Act

  Neil Zirconia

  As umpteen karaoke singers have shown, the artistry of Neil Diamond is impossible to replicate. If you don't get too close to Neil Zirconia, who dubs himself "the ultimate faux diamond," it's easy to pretend that the gravelly warble knockoff you're getting is the real gem. Discovered by an Elvis impersonator — how apt — Chuck LaPaglia has delivered sparkling… More >>