George Clooney's real performance of the year wasn't "Up in the Air." Plus: Jane Campion, "Star Trek" and madness! A month or so ago, as critics' top-10 lists started trickling onto various Oscar-related blogs, I noticed that one list or another would be branded "idiosyncratic," and I started to wonder exactly what that meant. Is there a hypothetically perfect list, a list that follows some ideal template? Is the ideal list the one that's most in tune with the Zeitgeist? One that doesn't contain any foreign-language or otherwise "weird" films that the majority of the American populace hasn't seen? Considering that 2009 saw the theatrical release of some 600 movies — not that any critic comes close to seeing them all — isn't any list made by any individual human being going to be idiosyncratic in some way? The notion that there's an acceptable critical view, that certain movies must — or must not — appear on a l...