As year-end traditions go, the awarding of the “dubious achievement” Hapsters for theatrical highs and lows can be traced back to 1994. So take a stroll down this year’s memory lane with us and remember, the decision of the judges -- OK, me -- is final.

Best Pulitzer Prognostication: Anyone can produce a play that has already won the Pulitzer Prize. Palm Beach Dramaworks does it all the time. The real skill is in selecting a script before it earns the prize. The Caldwell Theatre pulled off that nifty trick, mounting a top-notch production of Bruce Norris’s politically incorrect Clybourne Park in January, three months before it copped a Pulitzer.

Best Shameless Box Office Grab: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre discovered the commercial value of casting kids from the community in its production of The Sound of Music, assuring ticket sales from the tots’ families and neighbors. At the end of 2011, the theater doubled down on the idea, signing up 240 local youngsters to appear in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in alternating teams of 30. One wonders what is next. A permanent rotation of Oliver! and Annie?

Best Reason to See Red: Early in the year, the Maltz Jupiter Theatre was crowing about a perceived coup, having snagged the performance rights to John Logan’s Tony Award-winning play Red, with the promise that it would be the Florida premiere. But no one told Coral Gables’s GableStage, which also put the play in its season in November, three months before the planned Maltz production. Oh, well: the Maltz can still brag about having the Palm Beach County premiere of Red.

Worst Theater News of 2012: Nominated several times for the regional Tony Award, Florida Stage grew to become (as it loved to state) “the nation’s largest professional theatre producing exclusively new American work” in its 24 years of operation. Addressing his theatergoers in announcing his new season, producing director Lou Tyrrell said in a press release, “This year, for our twenty-fifth, I think they might expect a few extra little surprises along the way.”

Indeed. In June, just before the scheduled opening of its summer show, Ella, Florida Stage abruptly announced it was closing permanently and filing for bankruptcy, leaving a giant hole in the area’s theater community. The cause? Audience rebellion and attrition from the company’s first season at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.

The Best Theater News of 2012: Tiny (an adjective producing artistic director Bill Hayes hates to hear when describing his company) Palm Beach Dramaworks moved into new larger, better-equipped, more comfortable digs, trading up from 84 seats to 218 at the new Don and Ann Brown Theatre (the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts). If you are unsure of the theater’s location in downtown West Palm Beach, look for World of Beer and it is across the street to the west.

A year earlier, Dramaworks announced it would open on 11-11-11, a risky declaration with any major construction project, and darned if it didn’t open on time and on budget. It is the kind of well-planned, prudent renovation that makes coming up with punch lines very difficult.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award: No, not Dolly Gallagher Levi, but Michael Hall, who came out of retirement to return to the Caldwell Theatre, where he was the founding artistic director, to stage its production of Next Fall. And according to Hall, he is in search of a good script to direct there again.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 2: To Nancy Barnett, for her return to the stage in the Caldwell Theatre’s After the Revolution. She had given up acting to join the staff of Florida Stage, eventually becoming the company’s managing director. And considering how that ended, it is fair to assume she is a better actress than administrator.

The “So Nice To Have You Back Where You Belong” Award, No. 3: Jan McArt, lately a professor and producer or theater at Lynn University in Boca Raton, could not pass up the opportunity to get back onstage in a staged reading of Murder on Gin Lane by Carbonell judge Tony Finstrom. The fact that she loaned them the use of the Wold Performing Arts Center stage may have something to do with the casting, but it was refreshing to see her back in action.

The “I Want To Be A Producer” Award: Three guys from Boca Raton, all in their 20s -- Philip Morgaman, Frankie J. Grande and Brian Kapetanis -- became real-life Max Bialystocks, producing the $3 million Broadway revival of Born Yesterday, which garnered two Tony Award nominations. True, they lost all of their investors’ money, but they had a great time and they will probably be back producing another show soon.

Worst-Kept Pseudonymous Secret: In Florida Stage’s fifth annual 1st Stage Festival of New Works, a biography of Edgar Allen Poe, called Poet (get it?) by Kew Henry, was among the scripts read. The author turned out to be Kathleen Holmes (same initials, get it?), wife of founding producing director, Lou Tyrrell. There is no truth to the rumor that the play caused the demise of Florida Stage, but it might have been a small contributing factor.

Best Onstage Projectile Vomiting: Kim Ostrenko, for tossing her cookies eight times a week with unnerving authenticity in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage at the Caldwell.

Worst Performance by a Seven-Time Emmy Award Winner: To Ed Asner, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Dust Bowl-dry history lesson FDR, which managed to include every wrong note of one-person shows, plus a wobbly-accented, fumbling impersonation of the 32^nd president. Fortunately, the Caldwell Theatre made a little profit on the booking, which ran a too-long, one-week’s time.

Best (as in Longest) Delayed Opening of a Theater Company: Despite its generally known money woes, the Caldwell Theatre startled the theater community by announcing the creation of a second stage program in Boca’s Mizner Park. This so-called Caldwell 2 was to have opened in early September with Anne Nelson’s The Guys, a mournful tale commemorating 9/11. But shortly before the launch, the production was scrapped, with the dubious claim that audiences would not be interested in the subject after the 10^th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.

So the opening of Caldwell 2 was deferred to December, with a more upbeat selection of the comic Reindeer Monologues. That too was scrubbed, with artistic director Clive Cholerton citing insufficient box office revenues for its mainstage show, After the Revolution. The Caldwell 2 has two more time slots in 2012, but the Vegas odds are rising that the series ever happens.

Best Glasses-Steaming Debut: Palm Beach State College coed Georgina Castens made her professional stage debut in Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll as the nightie-garbed Southern nymphet title character in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production. Artistic director Kermit Christman knew he had the right play when he read that the 1956 movie version had been condemned by the powerful Catholic League of Decency, and that Time Magazine called it the “dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited.”

Castens made a promising debut, but her production photos -- still floating around the Internet -- are sensational.

Most Optimistic New Company Line-Up in a Miserable Economy: Despite the continuing sluggish economy, Palm Beach County is brimming with new theater companies, or at least announced new companies hoping to open in 2012.

There is Kim St. Leon’s Parade Productions, with definite dates in late January-early February for Brooklyn Boy by Donald Margulies at the Mizner Park Cultural Center. There is The Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, the troupe headed by Lou Tyrrell emerging from the ashes of Florida Stage with March-April dates for a new Woody Guthrie revue.

Independent producer Alan Jacobson has announced plans to lease Florida Stage’s former space in Manalapan, launching Plaza Theatre in February with a one-woman revue starring Donna McKechnie. And last, and probably least, Gary Waldman and Jamison Troutman, producers of several failed theater ventures locally, are returning to the area to found the Boynton Beach Theater Company. The best it can muster for a premiere is the “long-awaited” revival of Snow Birds, a lightweight revue aimed at the condo crowd, beginning Feb. 1.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Leave it to someone’s doctoral thesis to explain why this year at the movies there are two films that look back on the early days of the art form (The Artist, Hugo) and so many others also focused on the past, from biographies of Marilyn Monroe (My Week with Marilyn), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (J. Edgar) and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to fictional accounts of the aftermath of 9/11 (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), World War I (War Horse) and the civil rights ’60s (The Help).

Whether or not history proves this to be a stellar year at the movies -- unlikely -- I had no problem filling a 10-best list, with such worthy releases as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Moneyball and A Separation just missing the cut.

1. The Descendants -- Director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) returned triumphantly with his first feature in seven years, the tale of a Honolulu lawyer who learns soon after his wife lands in a coma from a boating accident that she had been unfaithful. George Clooney brings gravitas to the role, learning to be a father to his two distant daughters.

2. The Artist -- In these days of high-tech computer graphics, this staunchly retro black-and-white, silent film (complete with text titles) about the early days of talkies delivered a very pleasurable, pure cinematic experience.

3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- The emotionally loaded subject of 9/11 hovers over a quirky story of a young boy’s odyssey around New York searching for the meaning of a key left him by his dead father. Bring Kleenex.

4. The Tree of Life -- Despite a self-indulgent, dinosaur-laden prologue, director Terence Malick then uses his lyrical style to focus in on the domestic drama of a Texas family with a domineering dad (an impressive Brad Pitt). Note the exquisite available-light cinematography.

5. The Skin I Live In -- Masterful Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar reunites with one of his early discoveries, the sensual Antonio Banderas, as a plastic surgeon trying to recreate the image of his dead wife on a woman imprisoned in his basement. Then the movie gets kinky.

6. 50/50 -- Cancer becomes the stuff of comedy as Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a guy battling a rare lymphoma. The laughs are not cheap and eventually director Jonathan Levine and writer Will Reiser lower the emotional boom. Anjelica Huston and Anna Kendrick provide sublime support as Gordon-Levitt’s overbearing mother and inexperienced therapist.

7. War Horse -- Call it Steven Spielberg’s World War I answer to Saving Private Ryan, wrapped around the loyal friendship of a British lad and the war-bound horse who survives combat despite all odds. Based on a children’s book and the Tony-winning puppet show, it has been transformed again into a heart-rending, exquisitely photographed film.

8. Hugo -- As improbable as a Martin Scorsese children’s film sounds, he showed how not to talk down to kids in this tribute to the early days of cinema and its pioneer, Georges Melies. He also demonstrated how to use 3-D correctly, in a kinetic film full of his masterful camera moves.

9. Take Shelter -- It is no longer surprising when Michael Shannon (Bug, Revolutionary Road) plays an unhinged soul, but he outdoes himself in this low-budget yarn of a construction worker disturbed by a premonition that a cataclysmic storm is headed his way.

10. The Help -- A wryly comic look at the dawning of the civil rights movement, in Jackson, Miss., during the early 1960s, as seen through the eyes of the black domestic help who gain the courage to speak out about their working conditions. In an ensemble of fine actresses, Viola Davis stands out.

It was a precarious year in theater in South Florida, with the sudden devastating demise of West Palm Beach’s Florida Stage, not quite offset by the expanded potential for Palm Beach Dramaworks in its new, larger space.

Zoetic Stage debuted in Miami with its impressive repertory company of area actors, while announced, but not yet open, are Parade Productions in Boca Raton and The Theater at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, presumably poised to shore up the battered theater landscape. Also still to come is Caldwell 2, a second stage offshoot of the Boca company, though two announced attempts to open in the new Mizner Park Cultural Center both were scrubbed for lack of time and resources.

Still, despite the challenges of the economy, there was plenty of impressive theater locally in 2011. Here are my highly subjective picks for 10 standouts.

1. All My Sons (Palm Beach Dramaworks) -- An early Arthur Miller family tragedy, expertly performed and visually striking on the company’s new stage, thanks to scenic wizard Michael Amico and director J. Barry Lewis.

2. Crazy for You (Maltz Jupiter Theatre) -- A tap-happy musical extravaganza built from recycled Gershwin songs, with giddy choreography by Shea Sullivan and a standout lead performance by Matt Loehr.

3. August: Osage County (Actors’ Playhouse) -- Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning dysfunctional family dark comedy, with a large ensemble cast of many of the area’s best actors. The company depends on musicals, but saves its creativity for plays.

4. Kiss of the Spider Woman (Slow Burn Theatre Company) -- An unlikely musical adaptation of Manuel Puig’s odd couple political drama, another ambitious achievement for this fledgling troupe, with a star-making turn by Renata Eastlick in the title role.

5. Ghost-Writer (Florida Stage) -- An ode to inspiration by Michael Hollinger as seen from the perspective of an uber-efficient secretary who continues to receive dictation from her author-boss after he passes away. A succinct example of why we will miss this company.

6. Clybourne Park (Caldwell Theatre Company) -- Artistic director Clive Cholerton challenged his audience with this politically incorrect sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, a look at racial matters in America over a 50-year span. Soon after this well-cast comedy opened here, playwright Bruce Norris copped a Pulitzer for it.

7. The Brothers Size (GableStage) -- Miami-raised Tarell Alvin McCraney finally got his area professional debut, directing his own stylized theater piece, a ritual tale of two brothers, one a hard-working garage owner, the other a felon recently released from prison. A potent blend of dance, song and words.

8. The Sound of Music (Maltz Jupiter Theatre) -- The tale of spunky young nun Maria Rainer, the final collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein has been encrusted with sugar over time, but you would never know that from Marc Robin’s production or the lead performance by radiant Catherine Walker.

9. West Side Story (Kravis Center) -- The landmark Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical that transplanted Romeo and Juliet to the mean streets of New York remains a vibrant modern classic and, here, a textbook example of what a national tour should be.

10. Beauty Queen of Leenane (Palm Beach Dramaworks) -- Martin McDonagh’s mother-daughter battle of wills in a dreary Irish village proved mordantly comic in the very capable hands of Barbara Bradshaw and Kati Brazda.

Film: American remakes of foreign films rarely improve on the original version, but that is exactly the feat that director David Fincher has pulled off with his take on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There were reasons to worry about what the maker of Fight Club and Se7en would do to this dark, dense cold case mystery, but he has been extremely faithful to the source material, while upping the violence and sex quotients. Daniel Craig is aptly brooding at Mikael Blomkvist, the investigative journalist recently convicted of libel, and Rooney Mara should catapult into the upper tier of female performers for her transformative work in the title role. At area theaters now.

Music: While many folks will be listening to a lot of church music over the next couple days, there are other kinds of grooves out there aside from the ones Santa’s sleigh leaves in your roof (hope you’ve got jolly-old-elf visitation insurance). Tonight at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach, the area’s hottest new jazz spot welcomes multi-reed man Eric Allison to First Street for a gig with his quartet. Allison, who grew up in Sarasota and holds degrees from Northwestern and the University of Miami, has been one of the most respected area jazzmen for 30 years, not just for his way with a tenor saxophone but also his compositional skill. The concert starts at 8 p.m. at the Arts Garage; tickets are $25 and up. Call 450-6357 or visit www.jazzproject.eventbrite.com.

Dance: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was given to wide mood swings and deep pessimism about his work. He was very unhappy with the ballet score he wrote in 1891-92 for a the second half of a double bill that featured Iolanta, a new one-act opera of his. The Nutracker, he wrote, “is infinitely worse than ‘Sleeping Beauty,’” and not even Tsar Alexander III’s thumbs-up review quelled his doubts. But today, it remains without doubt the most popular ballet ever written, and for millions of people around the world the word “ballet” means this one work, and this one alone. It’s a Christmas story, which helped it, but the chief reason for its success on and offstage is its extraordinary abundance of unforgettable melody. Along with Charles Dickens, Pyotr Tchaikovsky is one of the fathers of our modern Christmas. You can still catch the show at the Kravis Center this afternoon if you hurry, mounted by the Moscow Classical Ballet. Call 832-7469 or visit www.kravis.org.

What kind of small watering hole in a rural zoo in a family film has a one-sheet poster for The Third Man on its wall? The kind in a Cameron Crowe movie, that’s what.

There are no cinephile characters in the film, no justification for the poster’s being there, no subtle connection between this pleasant commercial product and Carol Reed’s masterpiece.

Nevertheless, I was happy to see this infinitesimal art-direction quirk. Crowe likes to throw cultural bones to his audience for no apparent reason – remember Todd Louiso’s jazz-obsessed nanny in Jerry Maguire? Likewise, he could have picked any generic film composer to create a score of manipulative music for We Bought a Zoo; instead he picked Jonsi, the dream-evoking frontman of ambient sensations Sigur Rós, to develop the film’s lovely and atmospheric compositions.

Furthermore, Crowe proves unafraid to subtitle one of his scenes, to depict a father-son quarrel with startling verisimilitude, or to float a reference no tyke will understand: When his daughter Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) has buried herself under a mountain of stuffed animals on her bed, her father Benjamin (Matt Damon) quips: “I can’t even find you; you’re like a Chilean miner.”

It’s a genuinely funny and hip line, and there are enough moments like this in We Bought a Zoo to compensate for its lesser moments of unfettered emotionalism, cardboard characterizations and implausible twists. Damon’s Benjamin is an investigate reporter specializing in thrill-seeking adventure narratives, but his life is in flux. His wife died six months earlier – it’s the second film in a row, after Contagion, that Damon plays a grieving widow – and he’s about to quit his job at a foundering newspaper (you can hear the faint echo of Jerry Maguire’s dramatic, story-inciting exit from his employer).

Ripe for a fresh start, he hires a realtor (Curb Your Enthusiasm player J.B. Smoove, in a funny cameo) to show him some properties, only to fall in love with the house with the most “complications:” It’s on the site of a once-successful zoo, full of hundreds of live animals, all of whom desperately need a new owner with deep pockets to save them from being put down. Benjamin, who has spent his career covering other people’s adventures, finally has an opportunity to live his own, despite the attitude of his son Dylan (Colin Ford), a brooding-artist cliché with whom he has been unable to bond.

Benjamin’s family is assisted by what can only be described, without irony, as a ragtag band of lovable eccentrics who work on the zoo ground. They include the impossibly hot, impossibly single 28-year-old zookeeper Kelly (Scarlett Johansson) – a self-professed shut-in who lives with her mother and devotes every free second to the animals – as well as Patrick Fugit’s monkey-carrying maintenance man and Angus Macfadyen’s short-fused daredevil.

Crowe’s scripts ooze precious gestures and lofty platitudes, and We Bought a Zoo is no exception. The screenplay, based on a true story and co-written with Aline Brosh McKenna, becomes little more than a succession of calamities and resolutions, some of them conjured out of thin air. There is never a sense that the lives and work of these damaged but well-intentioned people will end in disappointment; you can tell that from the poster alone. And there is really no excuse for John Michael Higgins’ one-note villain, a zoo inspector who apparently finds perverse glee in seeing businesses die.

But I walked out of the film in a mood that can best be described as stupidly happy. I wasn’t ready – at least not yet – to break down the movie’s weaknesses, preferring to revel in the director’s well-honed craftsmanship. He takes great care in the way the sunlight illuminates Damon’s tortured face as the twinkly refrains of Jonsi ascend on the soundtrack. His films, and We Bought a Zoo especially, are the bubbles at the top of a champagne glass, imbued with an effervescence that sparkles and goes down easy.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO. Director: Cameron Crowe; Cast: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, Angus Macfadyen, Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit, John Michael Higgins; Distributor: Fox; Rated: PG; Release date: Friday at most commercial cinemas