Happy holidays to one and all! It’s getting to be the most wonderful time of the year, and one of the most wonderful things about it is the bevy of movie options that typically grace us during the last couple months of the year.

I always try to get as excited as possible about the Academy Awards, that time-honored annual tradition in which Hollywood enrages the nation’s cinephiles by consistently displaying the most remarkable lack of good taste and common decency imaginable.

Hope you all enjoyed my top 10 list last week, and gleaned some useful recommendations. This week I’ll take a very quick look at “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which made my “most promising films I didn’t see” list but ended up being one of the most spirit-crushing disappointments of the year. I honestly don’t have much to say about such an empty film, so I suppose I might as well squeeze in my predictions for the Oscar nominations, set to be announced on Tuesday, Jan. 24, at which point you will surely marvel at my peerless prognosticative abilities.

I could go on a rambling, ill-tempered rant about the shocking lack of worthwhile films released in 2011. I could easily wallow in righteous indignation, and throw up my hands in disgust and defeat as I impotently curse Hollywood’s artistic bankruptcy and offer my own theories as to why last year saw the worst theater attendance numbers in 16 years. And I’d be right to do it. But this time of year, I prefer to ignore the crazed, rampaging elephant in the room and instead celebrate the few diamonds in the rough that kept me from completely losing my mind over the course of the past 12 months. So let’s get to it:

Hope you all had a great Christmas and are enjoying the final hours of 2011. My holiday season has been quite relaxing indeed, with the exception of the screening blitz I’ve been embroiled in since I realized the first draft of my year-end top 10 list was woefully inadequate. I’m trying to cram in as many movies as I can before my list is due for publication next week, and the experience has been mind-reeling but, of course, invigorating in  its own way.

It’s been a very hectic holiday season for me, and I have not fulfilled my role as movie guru nearly as thoroughly as I should have. This has more or less been the case for the majority of the year, actually, and consequently I find that there are a bevy of promising 2011 releases that I simply never got around to seeing (in my defense, the closest most of them ever played was San Francisco).

I had promised reviews of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Sitter” this week, but those plans were altered by the fact that my online source for such matters had listed an incorrect wide release date for the former, and the nation’s critics and moviegoing public have convinced me that I should skip the latter. So we are left with “The Descendants,” now playing in general release after generating incredible word of mouth during its run on the art-house circuit. I found it to be consistently engaging yet slightly disappointing given the buzz, but your mileage may vary.

How quickly things can change. Just a week ago, I was so desperate for a movie to review that I actually sat and watched “The Twilight Saga — Breaking Dawn: Part 1” for two hours. (I’ve broken bones, suffered through mono, gotten tattooed and had a wisdom tooth wrenched out of my head without Novocain, but honestly, all pale in comparison to the sheer unpleasantness of the “Twilight” experience.)

Right now, “The Muppets” and Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed family film/cinema ode “Hugo” are playing in theaters across the country. “The Descendants,” the triumphant return of director/screenwriter extraordinaire Alexander Payne (“Election,” “About Schmidt,” “Sideways”), is expanding in limited release.

“In Time.” “The Three Musketeers.” “Footloose.” “Johnny English Reborn.” These are among the films now playing in multiplexes across the country. I find this roster to be strange and unsettling, as I have apparently been laboring under the misapprehension that we were supposed to be smack-dab in the middle of awards season. Silly me.

We’re back to new movies this week with a quick look at “Hall Pass,” the latest raunchy comedy from Farrelly brothers (it was a close call between that and the Nic Cage exploitation vehicle “Drive Angry” — they both got terrible reviews, so I literally flipped a coin). Next week we’ll take a peek at “Rango,” followed by “Battle: Los Angeles.” Not the best lineup, but not the worst, either. 

It’s that time of year again — a time for victors to be showered in glory, for losers to be mocked and ostracized, and for creative artists to cheapen their craft by taking part in the ridiculous circus that we call the Academy Awards. 

We continue to play catch-up with late-2010 Oscar-bait movies as, in the interest of my own sanity, I do my very best to steer clear of the new wide releases (I won’t endure Ashton Kutcher for anyone — least of all you). So next week look for a review of “Blue Valentine,” which, along with this week’s “The King’s Speech,” was one of the promising titles that I unfortunately missed before publishing my year-end top 10 list a couple weeks back. We’ll get ’em all knocked out sooner or later.

I’ll continue to do my best catching up with some late 2010 releases while we wait for the new year to really get going. So in that vein we’ve got a brief look at the awards-season favorite “The Fighter,” along with my predictions for this year’s Oscar nominations. Completely meaningless, but kinda fun.

I  spent much of 2010 bemoaning the sad state of Hollywood studio filmmaking. But looking over a roster of the year’s most worthwhile releases, it struck me that it might not have been such a bad year after all. If you’re simply looking at the number of good films released, then 2010 was certainly not one for the books — but if you focus on the quality of the very best releases, few as they may have been, things start to look a bit different.

So the other day I go to look up what new films have opened in the Lodi/Stockton area over the weekend, and what do I find? “Burlesque” and “The Warrior’s Way.” If you’re not familiar with these titles, let it suffice to say that these are not the kinds of films one would either hope or expect to see opening in the month of December, when the air is supposed to be heavy with Oscar buzz.

So I was in the middle of the downtown Stockton movie theater, having just purchased a ticket for Todd Phillips’ comedy “Due Date,” when an advertisement for the Tony Scott/Denzel Washington action flick “Unstoppable” caught my eye.

It seems that I am prone to minor setbacks. These past few days, for example, I’ve been knocked flat on my butt by a flu that’s been going around, rendering me unfit to go out in public — much less sit in a movie theater for two hours, half-blind from NyQuil abuse, as all manner of improbably colored fluids are expelled from my every orifice. (Although I’ve been seeing most of my movies in Stockton these days, and such a spectacle is kinda par for the course down there.)

I hang my head in shame over my absence from Battle Royale these past couple weeks despite repeated promises of bustling activity, and I’ve no adequate excuse apart from the fact that I’ve been settling back into a 70-hour work week (split between two jobs) and have been very, very pressed for time. The election frenzy is finally over and things will calm down, and in the meantime please accept the meager update I’ve recently offered. More is coming. For reals.

Time has flown by so fast these past few weeks that I’ve barely had time to savor the build-up to Halloween. No matter: This week I’m making up for lost time with a look at “Paranormal Activity 2,” along with a short run-down on some random horror flicks I’ve seen in the past week or so. (The old “Film Log” feature is returning, thanks to Battle Royale, so be on the lookout as I attempt to log mini-reviews for every movie I watch. I usually average about four or five a week. Also, please see the sidebar for a brief update on the blog goings-on.)

Back with a proper review this week, although we’ll also delve into all that fun auteurism stuff again. Next week, I’ll take a look at “Paranormal Activity 2” just in time for Halloween. (It strikes me as a completely unnecessary cash-in sequel to a film that was perfect as a stand-alone, but there’s always a slim chance the filmmakers learned from last decade’s “Blair Witch 2” fiasco, and ensured that their movie augments an established mythos instead of, you know, taking a giant dump on it.

Before we jump into a brief, free-flowing discussion of auteurism — and how it relates to my lack of a review this week — I wanted to take a moment to remind my legions of adoring fans to drop by Battle Royale and contribute to the debate. We’re still discussing our favorite movie scenes of all time, and as soon as we get our assigned weekly updates worked out, you can expect daily-ish posts on all manner of movie-related nonsense.

All jabs aside, here is my list of top 20 movie scenes. Unlike the others, though, I have no way of listing them an any kind of order. The top three are my actual three favorite scenes, but after that they are in no particular order.

OK, so maybe “The Social Network” won’t make $200 million at the domestic box office. Once again, I appear to have overestimated the taste and sanity of mainstream American movie-goers. I’ll learn someday.