Not a great year, but we’ll see what ages.

I bought about 45 albums, very few singles, all downloads pretty much exclusively from Amazon. This year my mix was about 55/45 new versus back catalog. I still listen mostly from an iPod or my iPhone.

However, I do have the on-demand streaming services from Rhapsody, Spotify, and MOG. (I’m comped as an analyst but I’d happily spend $10 a month on one of them. Which one is for a later post.) And free Pandora. I love all of them for radio-style new music discovery and casual listening, and for try-before-you-buy analysis. I get a kick out of seeing what my friends listen to via Facebook and GetGlue. This social music thing, it might catch on. If only the artists could make money off it.

But I’m technically a digital music aficionado, as defined by digital behavior and high spending on music, and I often discover unfamiliar bands by – gasp! – reading reviews. Turntable.fm is fun, but way too much work. It’s like trash-talking for music. I am not a very successful DJ, and neither are most people.

My favorite new albums of the year were, roughly in order:

Best New Albums of 2011

• The Decemberists “The King Is Dead” – add alt-country to their repertoire
• Black Keys “El Camino” – who knew there were still rock bands?
• The Vaccines – my latest lo-fi, incredibly catchy, pop indulgence
• PJ Harvey “Let England Shake” – yeah, someone still does stirring protest songs
• T Bone Burnett Presents “The Speaking Clock Revue” – rootsy collection from Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman et al.
• Dum Dum Girls “Only in Dreams” – pop-punk grrls with some depth
• Jay-Z and Kanye West “Watch the Throne” – sure, it’s indulgent, but it’s fun when two big stars connect
• Wild Flag “Wild Flag” – I miss Sleater-Kinney, but this is a half-decent substitute
• Wilco “The Whole Love” – experimenting again, with spirit
• Florence + the Machine “Ceremonials” – I know it’s hipper to like St. Vincent, but the prog-rock Sinead, well, rocks

You might also like to look at Tune-Yards (I have a thing for female jazz singers that fool around in other genres), Paul Simon (his latest is like a poor man’s – make that an old poor man’s – Graceland), Fucked Up (gotta love a punk concept album), SPIN’s “Nevermind” tribute (half the covers are pretty awesome),  DJ Shadow (channeling Killing Joke of all things), and R.E.M.’s finale (but the Decemberists already did the best R.E.M. album of the year). I didn’t hate the Lou Reed/Metallica team-up, but it was an example of two big artists not connecting.

I was disappointed by The Girls (went from interesting to pretentious in a year 2 years), Airborne Toxic Event (no sophomore slump but nothing new), the Kills (a killer single), and Gang of Four (one of my all-time favorite bands, but what was I expecting?).

Happy Fourth. Throw another burger on the grill for me. As always, I’ll bring Mom’s potato salad (never tastes the same twice, but always good).

• The Social Network. High craft. Will launch a thousand start-ups.
• Toy Story 3. Huge heart. Up there with Pixar’s best.

I gave each of these 3.5 stars out of 5 on Flixster. Last year, I handed out five 3.5 star ratings and in 2008 one 4-star (The Dark Knight) and two 3.5′s. I reserve five stars for absolute classics like Casablanca, Duck Soup, The Big Sleep, and Chinatown.

Best of the rest (each gets a 3-star rating):

• Winter’s Bone. Ozark neo-realist gothic.
• I Am Love. Boy, those rich Milanese know how to live. And make sensuous, operatically over-the-top melodramas.
• Red Riding Trilogy. Like a great Mystery series touched with evil: This is the North, where we do what we want.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Quite possibly better than the book.
• Kick-Ass. Silly, silly critics, it’s not a satire, it’s po-mo fanboy superheroics taken to their logical conclusion
• Valhalla Rising. Undoubtedly awesome if one is on drugs: stoner Christian Vikings meet the heathen on the edge of the world.
• The King’s Speech. Three good leads; takes no risks. Will win many Oscars.
• Potter 7A. If you love our three heroes, you’ll love this installment; otherwise it may seem long and a little lonely.

I liked How to Train Your Dragon and Unstoppable also, but not quite enough to put ‘em in the top 10. The Academy nominators agreed with four of my favorites, one less than last year. Like the newly enlarged Best Picture noms, I like a mix of movies aimed at kids and grown-ups, with a range of budgets and box office performance.

A slightly encouraging sign: some good movies for adults actually made money this year. Toy Story 3, that appeals to both kids and adults, topped the charts.

It’s always fun to look at the year’s box office. Not a lot of movement on the hits vs. long-tail, kids vs. grown-ups, or “Can’t Hollywood Do Anything Creative” fronts. Last year’s total dollar take was roughly flat with 2009, though boosted by 3D ticket prices. There was one $400 million hit in 2010, and roughly five $300 million sellers, with 29 over $100 million. In 2009, Avatar was a $750 million monster, with a single $400 million seller and a few at $300 (32 over $100 million). There were five or six franchises in the top 10 both years, though more animation in 2010.

I bought a little less music this year than last: about 50 albums and EPs, no singles, almost exclusively digital downloads this year. The Virgin Megastore closed. And I buy from Amazon, not Apple. Amazon’s cheaper and ships a higher bitrate MP3. That’s not to say I don’t do all my playing back on a Mac or iPod or iPhone, and manage my collection in that horrid spreadsheet of a music software app, iTunes.

My purchase mix was about 60/40 new versus back catalog, and I bought a little more jazz and a lot more Americana/roots than last year. I ripped a handful of other people’s CDs, but some of those I bought as gifts. I’m still way above the average American in music spending, even though the stuff I bought ranged in price between free, $3.99 and $5 (thank you, Amazon promotions) and $12-$13. Accent on the cheap stuff.

My favorite new albums of the year, in rough order were:

Best Albums of 2010

• Titus Andronicus “The Monitor” – as if Springsteen were punk, channeled the Pogues, and did a concept album on the Civil War
• Surfer Blood “Astro Coast” – lo-fi Beach Boys
• Paul Weller “Wake up the Nation” – way more eclectic and lively than his recent post-Jam stuff
• Various artists “Crazy Heart Soundtrack” – the actors actually sing borderline – but not quite – parody country songs very well
• The Walkmen “Lisbon” – melancholy suits a sad year
• John Mellencamp “No Better than This” – convincingly rootsy
• Swans “My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky” – outright dirge
• Neil Young “Le Noise” – old hippie sounds very modern
• David Byrne & Fatboy Slim “Here Lies Love” – yeah, it’s a disco musical about Imelda Marcos, deal with it
• Grinderman “Grinderman 2″ – does Nick Cave get hornier the older he gets?

I liked another aging punk, former Sleater Kinney singer Corin Tucker’s “1,000 Years,” another soundtrack, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross doing “The Social Network,” New Orleans funk from Galactic (“Yo-Ka-May”), the collaborative headed by Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse (“Dark Night of the Soul”), another collaboration featuring The Chieftans and Ry Cooder and others (“San Patricio” Latino-Irish!). I was disappointed by the latest from Elvis Costello, the National, M.I.A., the Thermals, the Dead Weather, and Killing Joke.

Sure, the movie is aware of the irony that Facebook was created by a guy with no social skills and no network of his own. That’s why it’s titled as it is, and not called “The Accidental Billionaire.” It’s a really well-told tale about class, obsession, and betrayal, but it’s not about Internet social networking. That’s just the MacGuffin.

Still, how you react to the movie – and to its portrayal of (anti-)hero Mark Zuckerberg – probably depends a bit on what you already felt about Facebook before you bought your ticket. David Denby suggests in the New Yorker that there’s a creative tension between writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher:

In this extraordinary collaboration, the portrait of Zuckerberg, I would guess, was produced by a happy tension, even an opposition, between the two men—a tug-of-war between Fincher’s gleeful appreciation of an outsider who overturns the social order and Sorkin’s old-fashioned, humanist distaste for electronic friend-making and a world of virtual emotion.

Personally, I believe that Facebook is a hugely important force in online media, and probably in modern society. When Justin Timberlake – no way is Sean “Napster” Fanning Sean Parker that cool – seduces Zuck with his vision of start-up greatness, well, count me in.

I’m willing to forgive a lot of asshole-ness in pursuit of such grand goals. I suspect a lot of nerds will agree. Though it’s not about technology, this movie will launch a thousand start-ups.

This year’s patriotic plug. Being a regular Virginian isn’t quite the same as being a Lee, but it’s close.

Happy Fourth. Throw another hot dog on the grill for me. (I’ll bring Mom’s potato salad – “never tastes the same twice” but always good. This year with extra pickles.)

…Recontextualized as an imperative, the phrase sparks from a lyric on this record’s first track, “Gold Soundz,” a song like a chunk of quartz—jagged angles, splashy jangles, jazzy spangles in the yellow sun. It is a self-doubt song making the best of it as tunefully as its own title arrogantly promises.

“You’re empty and I’m empty, and you can never quarantine the past,” is the lyric. The quick, foxy tail of the Q slides into a verb carrying the squawk of official alarm. The phrase is a mouthful for a marketing department to choke on. It is syncopated to measure the gravity of nostalgia and the pull against it, indicative of a lyrical voice that is often of several minds about any number of things, settling on ambiguity as a controlling idea and ambivalence as a point of view, cultivating a double-negative capability.

What, are you auditioning for Sasha Frere-Jones’ job?

Actually, I think the new voting system helped Hurt Locker, as I’m assuming anybody that picked Up in the Air for best picture was more likely to pick Hurt Locker than Avatar as their second favorite. But we’ll never know.

I ended up 19 for 24, which is my best ever, and I got all the big five. I missed Foreign Language, as an easier, but less critically acclaimed movie won for the second year in a row. (I didn’t see any of them, but I’m up for A Prophet this week.) And Wallace and Gromit lost, for once. I had the sound categories splitting, but Locker took ‘em both.

I was quite surprised that Precious stole adapted screenplay from Up in the Air, esp since that meant Air ended up shut out completely. It was probably my favorite movie of the best picture noms.

I was teary-eyed at the John Hughes tribute, no matter how long it was. Hey, I’m high school class of ’79; I’m allowed. And I do miss Billy Crystal. Or Johnny. I liked it better when the stars were hammered. Speaking of which, where was Jack?