With 18 major critics group wins and a continuing presence among Oscar conversation debates, it would look like The Social Network is a shoe-in for a Best Picture statue. With its arrival on DVD and Blu-ray 11, January, that profile is sure to continue its upward swing. Yet some in the biz are convinced that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s look at Mark Zuckerberg’s rise from Harvard schmuck to dot.com billionaire will NOT win Academy favor come this February. Applying several suspect theories and delineating a collection of past indications and coincidental bellwethers, they are convinced that The King’s Speech, True Grit, Black Swan, and even a dark horse like The Kids Are All Right stand a better chance.

The ‘why?’ is as intriguing as the ‘why not?’ For many, the chief concern is the aging Academy membership demo. No matter what the members of the nu-media think, these dyed-in-the-wool old school cinephiles just won’t be won over by smart dialogue, great direction, pitch-perfect performances, and a topic as au currant as the Facebook phenom. Of course, they site precedent, and it’s a damn good one too - Jason Reitman’s brilliant, brave Up in the Air. Daring to turn a dark situation (the failing economy of 2009) into an even darker exploration of one man’s un-tethered life, said near masterpiece was Paramount’s big push for Oscar 2010 glory - and it had a bandwagon full of festival buzz and End of Year accolades in tow.

Now that the Christmas season has passed and the gifts have already been received, let’s take a nostalgic look at popular gifts through the years. During the 1990s, technology created all sorts of new gifts, but the most sought after toys were often refreshingly simple.

Tickle Me Elmo: It was the hot toy of the 1996 Christmas season. Squeeze Elmo’s stomach and he would vibrate and laugh. “Tickle Me Elmo Xtreme”, which also lies down and rolls around all on its own, was released ten years later.

The movies often teach us a lot about ourselves. They often boil down the human condition into simple celluloid slices of recognizable, universal truths. Sometimes, the lessons learned are dispirit and hard to swallow. Sometimes, they are as obvious as an ad campaign for the latest insipid studio comedy. Hollywood hates to think it does anything “educational” with its product. Instead, it meters out the mediocrity like so much kindergarten apple juice, believing (often rightly) that the masses want something mindless, not meaningful. The proof? The pathetic returns for films with actual legitimate meaning and artistic merit.

Still, we can learn a lot from the movies, with the tutorial often coming directly out of an unseen left field. In fact, the real import of the lecture can be lost in a swirl of CG gimmickry and tacky ticket over-pricing propaganda (ie - 3D). So before 2011 delivers its own collection of cold hard truisms, Short Ends and Leader has decided to outline some of the 24 frames a second messages we received via the cinema during the last 12 months. More importantly, feel free to share some of yours below. That way, we can walk through this funny little muddle called movie life together, without being sideswiped by some unseen filmic truism.

A few months back, Web Nation was mocking an article by Joe Queenan in which he asserted, right around annual midpoint, that 2010 was destined to be the worst year in film ever. Before the onslaught of awards season fodder, before the full faith and credit of the cinematic circumstance could be fully gauged, he had already given up, declaring all a bust. One wonders what his opinion would be now that Tinseltown has ramped up its End Times talent scouting and publicity machine. A lot of powerful titles arrived in the last two months of 2010, works that reasserted the aesthetic quality of the artform overall - and yet, it’s hard to argue that anything here would stand the test of time, let alone a 2011/2009 comparison.

In defense of Mr. Queenan’s position, once you get past the Top 20, say, there’s not much to celebrate. Bubbling under the surface of this list were worthy entries such as Rabbit Hole, Winter’s Bone, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Four Lions. There was also a smattering of interesting if not wholly classic possibilities like Shutter Island, Biutiful, The Town, and 127 Hours. After that, what’s left? Not much, or better yet, not much worth mentioning. There are some smitten with the dour divorce crash-coursing of Blue Valentine or the faux homosexual insights of The Kids Are All Right. Others will tout wholly questionable quirk like Cyrus or obtuse foreign documentaries about subjects important to those affected, if any. As the mainstream continues to buckle under product pressure performance, we get more and more of the mediocre and less and less artistic flights of fancy.

It’s time to shoot some filmic fish in a barrel. Indeed, every year, it gets easier and easier to pick out cinema’s worst. The question, of course, is “Why?” The answer, sadly, is inherent in the business itself. Seems that Hollywood has finally got a handle on how to micromanage a movie down to its most basic demographic components. It doesn’t need to be well made or entertaining, creative or even competent. As long as it supplies the mandatory focus group facets (dumb jokes for the kiddies, splatter-free PG-13 scares for the teens), it should make enough money to warrant the investment. Tinseltown lives in mortal fear of something like James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know, a $100 million gamble that argues for its place as a smart RomCom, but dies because the audience is already used to the genre being stilted and stupid.

And so it continues, affronts like You Again and Letters to Juliet making ‘love’ the worst kind of four letter word. Similarly, slop like The Tourist and Killers showed that nothing is less thrilling than famous faces acting the espionage fool. There was The Last Airbender, yet another nail in M. Night Shyamalan’s already interred coffin and Sex and the City 2, an unnecessary sequel to a franchise no one really requested in the first place. From Valentine’s Day to Death at a Funeral, Clash of the Titans to Little Fockers, 2010 was ripe with the repugnant. So those singled out here must be really bad, right? Without a doubt.