What Happened to Originality? Lamenting over booms of the last few years.

Obviously every year in film is not the same. I'm somewhere around my 77th film of 2011, and, even though I've to date seen 95 in 2010, 2010 seemed to have much better movies. More noticeably though, are various booms that genres have had in various years. 2008 and 2009 were extremely strong years for animated films, giving us WALTZ WITH BASHIR, WALL-E, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, and PONYO. It was almost customary for the Pixar movie that came out to inevitably win the Oscar for Best Animated Film. This seemed as if it were to change, but then, this past year in 2011, what did we have other than RANGO? The Pixar submission wasn't much, and there wasn't anything for inventiveness anywhere else. In 2010, I found myself watching documentary after documentary. Some weren't great, like THE ART OF THE STEAL, but even films like that were passionate and intriguing in their own way. But consider the great films that came out in 2010 like CATFISH, which has been seeming better and better every time I reconsider it. There was MARWENCOL, a sad and weird rumination on art. INSIDE JOB was clean and relevant, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP was another weird consideration of what art was in 2011, the ballsy RESTREPO. And there are still even more documentaries from 2010 that still intrigue me, and stew in my Netflix Queue. In 2011, what was there? I have yet to see two that I have high hopes for, Werner Herzog's INTO THE ABYSS and the acclaimed THE INTERRUPTERS, but from what I've seen, only Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS belonged in the company of the caliber of documentaries from 2010. These booms of documentaries or animated films show something I lament, that we get so close to breaking through, and then we falter.