Here are the 2010 results (complete with movie posters!), which are visible for non-members. For those of you who would rather not click, here’s the top 20 in list form. Think of these as the Nerd Oscars.

1. Inception
2. The Social Network
3. Black Swan
4. Toy Story 3
5. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
6. True Grit
7. The King’s Speech
8. Kick-Ass
9. How to Train Your Dragon
10. The Town
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11. Exit Through the Gift Shop
12. Shutter Island
13. Winter’s Bone
14. 127 Hours
15. The Ghost Writer
16. The Fighter
17. Dogtooth
18. Animal Kingdom
19. Blue Valentine
20. Enter the Void

There are probably plenty of critics who have top tens that are very similar to the bottom ten above. It was a really good year for film.

My personal list:

1. Blue Valentine
2. The Social Network
3. Inception
4. The Ghost Writer
5. Animal Kingdom
6. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
7. Shutter Island
8. The Town
9. Black Swan
10. Enter the Void

Some really quick random thoughts:

- Blue Valentine just devastated me so much that I couldn’t imagine selecting any other movie as #1, not even Inception.

- I believe I’ve already commented on here on the slickness of The Social Network; this blog post goes into extreme film buff detail about the incredible directing job by David Fincher.

- The Ghost Writer is just a really well-constructed old-school thriller made by a rapist.

- Animal Kingdom is a massively under-the-radar Australian crime film — a slow burner that only gets better as it unravels, concluding in the most satisfying way possible.

- I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, alright? I appreciate Edgar Wright’s comic and stylistic sensibilities. -

- Shutter Island would have been amazing in black-and-white, but that cinematography made the colorful dream sequences stand out that much more.

- The Town cemented Ben Affleck as a damn good director (what?). Meanwhile, Darren Aronofsky put together a bit of a hot mess in Black Swan — the guy sure has style, though.

- Enter the Void is painfully overlong, but it sticks in your head for even longer, which is why it deserved a spot on the list.

- In case you were wondering, I saw Exit Through the Gift Shop and I didn’t love it. Jackass 3D is above it in the documentary category.

- Movies that I want to see but haven’t yet: True Grit, Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech, Winter’s Bone, 127 Hours, The Fighter.

I’m going to write a bit more about some recently watched movies (including some mentioned here) sometime this week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZNspDuvkDE

This is my way of talking about The Social Network without dedicating a post to a pitiful attempt at being a film critic. I think this song is indicative of just how cool this David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin collaboration is. It’s a movie fueled by a fantastic soundtrack by Reznor and Ross, a non-stop script from Sorkin, and ingenious directing by Fincher. All the components come together to form the quickest two hours you’ll spend in a theater this year.

Yeah, Facebook is the backdrop for the action in the film, but it’s not what drives it. The movie is about a quest for importance — for coolness. It’s about a kid who was smart enough to take an idea and bring it to its inevitable end. Facebook almost does seem like an end, doesn’t it? If the end of the Cold War was the “end of history”, Facebook is the end of the anonymous internet — at least in the sense that neither is really true, but can easily be seen that way. ANYWAY…

Fincher brilliantly flips back and forth between the creation of Facebook and two depositions of the lawsuits it spawned, splicing together sentences, contrasting excitement with irritation, and chronicling the destruction of a friendship both in real-time and in retrospect. I haven’t even mentioned Jesse Eisenberg’s performance of Mark Zuckerberg, which will probably become the way most people imagine the youngest billionaire on the planet. It’s probably not fair nor intelligent to take the film as any sort of documentary, but it’s impossible not to be sucked in. Everything seems so damn believable, from Zuckerberg blogging about his ex-girlfriend (apparently actually true) while creating a website to rank Harvard girls in his spiteful mood, to the way he’s lured in by the magnetic personality of Sean Parker portrayed by Justin Timberlake*, to the arrogant way he dismisses any claims of wrongdoing.

It’s just an immaculately crafted movie, and the critics calling it some “defining movie of this generation” aren’t too far off. I never, ever thought I would say that going in. David Fincher is back.

*Seriously, Justin Timberlake’s performance was great. If you told me 10 years ago that some kid from N’Sync would be a good actor, and that Ben Affleck would be an arguably great director, I would have expected you to think a black dude was going to be president, too.