ANOTHER YEAR DRAWS TO A CLOSE; and that means North America’s film critics are churning out their assorted “best movies of the year” lists.

Entertainment Weekly got ahead of the pack last month with a cover story calling 1999 “The Year That Changed Movies.”

Its premise: Cheap digital video, fancy computer animation, Internet publicity and distribution, and a resurgent indie-film scene combined to transform U.S. cinema.

Instead of a year that was supposed to have been dominated by The Phantom Menace and megastar action vehicles, we got a year dominated financially by The Blair Witch Project and critically by Being John Malkovich. A year in which the most talked-about special effect was the censoring of the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene. A year in which calling indie filmmakers “tomorrow’s Tarantinos” became treated as almost as bad an insult as calling them “tomorrow’s Spielbergs.”

Michael Wolff, the best thing in New York magazine these days, largely concurs. Back in September, he wrote that “it is becoming painfully clear to everyone but the studio executives that the blockbuster, brand-supporting movie is dead.”

“Imagine a world without movie stars,” Wolff writes; claiming celebrity covers no longer guarantee magazine sales (then why do print magazines about the Internet keep contriving lame excuses to feature Courtney Cox or Michael Jordan up front?). Wolff goes on to envision a society where everybody thinks they’re a potential screenwriter, actor, or director; where Hollywood’s centralized, rigid hierarchy gets tossed aside like yesterday’s drug fad. Where even the conglomerates that own the big studios recognize they can’t make consistent, stockholder-expected profit levels from business-as-usual moviemaking (even as a loss-leader for merchandise licensing).

Couldn’t happen soon enough, I say.

Whether it really is happening this way, and whether it’s happening fast enough, is still debatable.

Wasn’t too long ago that I was complaining about how indie film had gotten tired and tiresome. The whole Sundance Festival-centered sub-industry had devolved into Hollywood’s farm league, churning out interchangeable “hip violence” thrillers and gross-out comedies for release thru the big studios’ pseudo-indie distribution arms.

But, gradually, hope has returned.

This hope has come from online PR and film-discussion sites, alternative-to-the-alternative film festivals, streaming-video movie sites (many of them Seattle-based), and all the other aspects of a rapidly maturing DIY-moviemaking support network.

No longer need the aspiring next Cassavettes scrounge for funds to assemble a full shooting crew, then scrounge again for editing funds in time to make the big sales push to the Miramax gatekeepers.

Today’s Patricia Rozema wannabe can start off by making no-budget digital-video shorts, building her skills and style while networking with her fellow visionaries. When she’s ready to tell longer tales, she’ll have learned how to tell them effectively–and how to get them made and disseminated properly.

If we’re lucky, this neo-indie scene will remain diffuse and cheap enough that no future Viacoms or Time Warners can ever take it over.

Though they’ll most certainly try.

TOMORROW: A visit to the Cinema Grill.