2009's Coolest Pop Culture

This has been a vintage year for pop culture, say Wired writers listing their year's best in fields from film to video games to microsculpture.

• Stephen Colbert's "hyper-real genius" made the year for Scott Thill, who believes "Earth’s most relevant living cultural critic" is long overdue for an Emmy for The Colbert Report.
  

• "Instant sci-fi classic" Moon was the year's best film, according to Lewis Wallace. Indie filmmaker Duncan Jones proved that "brainy ideas are more important than big budgets when it comes to sci-fi flicks," he writes.
• "Gaming's greatest iconoclasts" made it a good year for Gus Mastrapa. Releases like Tim Schaefer's Brutal Legend and Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy may have had their flaws, he writes, "but these videogame visions were unique, undiluted, and mandatory."

Click the link at right for the full list.
(More Stephen Colbert stories.)