Southern beauty: Is it even there anymore?

I am from India, lived there all my life and now am here in a Southern state studying in a southern school amidst people who have so much more idea about the southern culture than I do. Everybody has a different perception of the South, even people based in different regions of the same country. I myself gained all the information or may I call it my understanding of the south from the movies that I watched, from the music I heard and the news that I watched on my television back home. I remember sitting at home watching movies like Gone With the Wind and thinking if that's how beautiful that place really is. I got to see Georgia from that perspective of a movie. But then I came over here and living here in the middle of the city I was disappointed. Disappointed at how my thoughts and all my dreams were overshadowed with Atlanta's skyline. Where are those beautiful houses with the lush green lawns in the front. Where are the beautiful crystal clear streams flowing on the side of the roads? Years of movies such as O Brother Where Art Thou, Forrest Gump and Green Mile were being questioned by my mind. If really there was the southern beauty, where is it now? Some of my fellow peers here, lucky enough to have been living here have talked about how they have still encountered the true "southern beauty". But how much of that is in areas that you would want to live today? Would it even be possible to live in a beautiful house in the suburbs at the cost of you not being able to get a job? I feel that the whole beauty of the south has been crushed by the industrialization. The south has truly progressed but i must say at a loss of it's known identity for beauty.