If anybody out there in La Jolla Land hasn’t seen “The Town” yet, you should run right over to the local AMC, because come Oscar season you’ll be sorry you missed it. Directed by Ben Affleck, “The Town” is just the latest in a string of gritty hard-knock tales of Boston’s criminal underbelly, keeping company with gems like “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” (Affleck’s first directing gig) and “The Departed.”

So why should you care, my little California-born ruffians? Because these movies (in addition to all of the Boston-centric novels of Dennis Lehane) have begun to capture the public’s imagination in a manner little seen in today’s tiny google-able world.

In case you’ve forgotten, all of the aforementioned films were Oscar-nominated, and “The Departed” swept up four wins, including the coveted Best Picture.

This trend comes as no surprise; since “The Sopranos” ended and Scorsese has taken to filming Leonardo DiCaprio play detective instead of crafting epic gangster dramas, Hollywood has been in need of a new kind of crime flick. It isn’t about New York Italians anymore. Boston’s unique history has made the tides shift to a whole new kind of “family.”

Growing up on the West Coast, Boston was just a city on a map to me, while places like New York were divided colorfully in my mind into Brooklyn and Harlem, Manhattan and Queens. Today, however, I find myself walking out of theatres dropping my “R’s” and contemplating the differences between the South Boston projects and Bunker Hill.

So what makes the place so captivating? Boston historically has some of the poorest slums in the nation, stemming from the tides of Irish immigrants that settled there in the late 19th century. According to the now-numerous romanticized films based in the city’s dingy streets, these 12 decades of poverty have bred a unique sense of pride and justice into the community with unapologetically tragic outcomes. Teen mothers leave toddlers in empty apartments to score heroin or oxy, and men have few moral qualms about turning to thievery when the only other job available is hard labor.

Charlestown also has the highest rate of bank robberies per capita in the nation, which just goes to show that these aren’t your average, run-of-the-mill thugs; it takes a lot of forethought and intelligence to execute such high-stakes crime. Southies take care of each other, these films tell us, and they have a sense of right and wrong that just happens to operate outside the law.

Not since “The Godfather” have such riveting and fact-based crime films entered into the public consciousness. Perhaps such stories are so captivating because they each tackle the same desire for escape from polluted, tight-knit, dead-end communities.

Their appeal is not hurt by the fact that these films have been graced by some of the most talented names in the business (Ben and Casey Affleck, Clint Eastwood), but the superb acting and directing only add to the allure of the stories themselves.