Name: The Florida Project Should've Been Nominated
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T17:33:11.000Z
Duration: 7 min 11 s
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You know, I don't really get upset about Oscar snubs anymore because, I mean, it's the Oscars.

Adverbs of degree

But I was a little sad to hear that Sean Baker's the Florida Project didn't make the cut for Best Picture this year, because I think when it comes to the Academy Awards, the nominations really matter more than who the eventual winner is.

It's always silly to pick the best anything when it comes to art, but.

But with the nominations, at least the 7,000 members of the Academy get a chance to highlight a field of diverse, transformative films.

If the Oscars won't highlight the Florida project, then I'm happy to, because it's without a doubt one of the best films of 2017.

And watching it for me was one of those transporting experiences that I only get a few times a year, if at all.

The story is about a group of kids and their parents who live in a budget motel outside of Disney World in Florida.

The people who live in this community are on the economic margins, not quite homeless, but

not quite able to keep a permanent roof over their heads either.

The struggles of living in this kind of poverty give the film an undertone of sadness, but

the genius of the Florida Project is that it tells its story from the perspective of the children who can't help but see their world as a playground.

Baker is pulling heavily from Hal Roach's Little Rascals, a classic series of comedy short films from the 20s and 30s that was groundbreaking in the way that it showed kids as well, kids trying to capture the nuances of their behavior and energy in a naturalistic way.

Like the Florida Project, Rascals was set against economic hardship, the Great Depression.

These kids, too were growing up in poverty, but the focus was never on that.

It was on the scrappy optimism of childhood.

Now, the Florida Project has deeper ambitions than Rascals, but

that optimism, the brightness of this point of view, is everything.

It keeps the subject matter from being too overwhelming, something that can shut down our ability to empathize and sympathize.

Sean Baker, I think, understands, understand something really critical about storytelling, that we don't absorb things by looking directly at them.

Often we see more clearly through indirect means.

There's a lot that Baker and co writer Chris Burgosh want to say about the hidden homeless in America, but

they don't just come right out and say it or show it.

The reality of these troubled lives exists in the peripheral vision of a child's day.

Baker and a cinematographer, Alexis Sabe, keep the camera low, parents are often framed peanut style, just a bunch of legs.

Even when the kids aren't around, they favor low angles so that adults tower over the frames.

And through the course of the film, you remember what it's like to see the world from such a low angle.

You remember how big everything seemed and how much sky there actually is.

Carefully building this perspective pays off in a scene like this, where you have a key piece of information about these people's lives, which is that they struggle so much to make their bills that they need the assistance of a local church food bank.

Baker plays this scene again from young Mooney's perspective.

And we have to piece together what's really happening here.

He doesn't want to show us the food assistance itself.

He wants to show us how normal something like that is to Mooney.

In fact, all of the film's most crushing moments are played from the perspective of kids.

When Mooney's mother starts prostituting herself to make rent.

This is the way that the Flower Florida Project shows us.

Something is always seen through something else.

The decaying edgelands outside Disney World are seen through the colorful imagination of an adventurous kid.

The promise of Disney World is seen through the poverty that surrounds it.

The pain of living without work is seen through the kindness of neighbors and strangers and motel managers.

The film's two main characters are seen through each other.

In some ways, Hayley is a loving, caring mother.

In others, she's a delinquent, selfish mother.

These are all things that we see and learn through the way that Moony acts.

In Haley, we see a Mooney that was a child that grew out of her innocence.

It's in the continuum of these two that the film finds a way to express truths that are larger than the movie itself.

For those living in the margins of late capitalism, tossed around by the wave of the Great Recession, Mooney and Haley are representative of a cycle of hardship that can lock itself into a family tree.

For decades, mothers like Haley bear some of the responsibility for the situation.

But we bear some of the responsibility too, because, as the film shows us, mothers like Haley are really just kids like Mooney, and

It's a way of understanding the individual and societal responsibilities for poverty that only a film can achieve, and

only a film with this kind of discipline.

Now, this doesn't mean that the Florida Project is trying to Trojan horse a sad story to the viewer.

It's an incredibly joyous movie, fun to watch, like the Little Rascals and the particular heartbreak we feel doesn't and can't exist without that joy.

Baker couldn't express one without expressing the other because he understands that they're part of the same thing.

And this is the kind of filmmaking Academy members should promote through their nominations.

But I guess I shouldn't mind about snubs because, I mean, it's the Oscars.

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Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Florida Project Should've Been Nominated

perspective

discipline

depression

matter