We need to talk about 2011: Tom Sutcliffe tries to pin down the character of the cultural year

Tilda Swinton was mesmerising on screen, Jennifer Egan produced the must-read novel and the Booker judges argued about readability. But, says Tom Sutcliffe, the character of the cultural year is tough to pin down

Trying to determine the character of a cultural year is a bit like trying to establish the shape of a cloud when you're inside it. Set aside for the moment that cloud shape identification, like cultural generalisation, is a notoriously subjective science. Twenty years from now, should anyone be minded to look over 2011 for posterity and map its contours there will probably still be arguments about where it bulges and where it doesn't. But they will have the advantage of distance and perspective, which makes it easier to sort signal from noise. Back here, clinging to the edge of a year that isn't over yet, we're still in the foggy swirl of things and the solid and the vaporous can be tricky to tell apart.

Noise helps in navigation but, just as in cloud, it can be deceptive. Take this year's Booker row, kicked off when the chair of the judges, Dame Stella Rimington, announced that they were looking for "readable" books, an adjective which various critics described as essentially tautologous, and then reacted to as if it was anything but. Was it an insult or a statement of the obvious? Should literary fiction claim this virtue, or high-mindedly assert that oiling the turning of the pages wasn't the business of a serious writer? Fighting shoulder to shoulder, quite a few of Dame Stella's opponents found themselves firing in opposite directions – and the battle only heated up when it became clear that the shortlist had excluded several books that were held in higher regard outside the jury room than inside, including Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, Ali Smith's There but for the, Edward St Aubyn's At Last and Linda Grant's We Never Had It So Good.

After a surprisingly snippy speech (one hopes she never got as rattled when she was at MI5), Dame Stella and her panel soothed literary nerves by giving the prize to Julian Barnes' enigmatic novella The Sense of an Ending and the parade moved on. It wasn't the only judging fuss of the year, either – Carmen Callil declined to have her name attached to the decision to give Philip Roth the International Booker on what sounded like grounds of "readability". "It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe," she said of his writing, before adding the classic cloud-watcher's question: "In 20 years time will anyone read him?" Roth was rumoured to be in the running for the Nobel but, whether through literary asphyxiation or some other cause, the Academy conferred the prize on the Danish poet Tomas Tranströmer, allowing a tiny group of people to reward themselves for their discernment by murmuring, "About time too" and pretty much everyone else to go, "Who?"

It wasn't a year for a great American novel but Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad was a very good one – the year's high-minded beach read. The most timely thriller was Robert Harris's The Fear Index, which bet heavily on financial instability and economic meltdown and won big, and the only good showbiz biography was a spoof one: I, Partridge, a rare example of a book that's even better in the audiobook version than in print.

There are some things you can say from inside the cloud. At the cinema, British film was in good shape. The year began with The King's Speech, a study of stiff upper lip loosened by colonial charm that had Colin Firth making self-deprecating speeches at the Oscars and the Baftas. Other notable British films included Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which loitered unexpectedly at the British box office like an agent near a dead drop; Lynne Ramsay's brilliantly nightmarish adaptation of We Need to Talk about Kevin; and Joanna Hogg's Archipelago. It was also a vintage season for those who take their cinema black with the Australian films Animal Kingdom and Snowtown bookending the year with stories of family life turned toxic. Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights offered stiff competition in the field of human misery.

Not everything was so downbeat: Bridesmaids gave anyone with the price of a ticket the chance to ride along on a raucous hen-party, Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist [opening next week] celebrated the glories of silent cinema with tenderness, wit and invention, and Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In was a delirious return to form. But the prevailing mood was not optimistic: you could take your despair on a cosmic scale, as in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, or trapped within the grid of LA's streets in Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, or within the confines of a failing marriage in Blue Valentine, another of the releases that made this a year in which Ryan Gosling's taciturn style was difficult to avoid. The push for 3D, a big story in previous years, was more subdued – but the technique finally found itself in the hands of two serious film-makers, with Martin Scorsese's Hugo (which knowingly played with the idea of film as novelty spectacle) and Wim Wenders' Pina, a celebration of the choreographer Pina Bausch.

In theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company opened its new house in Stratford to mostly approving reviews but couldn't find a production to generate quite the same enthusiasm. Michael Boyd announced he would be making way for a new artistic director in 2012, one of a number of imminent changes at the top of Britain's theatres – including the Tricycle, where Nicholas Kent resigned in protest at the cuts but enhanced his theatre's reputation for analytical drama with Gillian Slovo's The Riots, based on interviews with those who took part in and tried to police the civil disturbances in August. Verbatim theatre also featured in Rufus Goold's Decade, which converted a London office building into the Windows on the World restaurant for an anniversary response to 9/11, and Alecky Blythe's London Road, a musical response to the murders of Ipswich women in 2006 which was for me one of the great first nights of 2011 (the Royal Opera House's premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole and the London opening of Tim Minchin's joyous Matilda qualify, too).

First night of the year, though, was Nicholas Hytner's production of One Man, Two Guvnors, which built the comedy from an inspired pratfall until the hilarity went critical and started to sustain itself. Richard Bean's clever updating of Goldoni's farce won him a double Best Play award at the Evening Standard awards, along with his global warming drama The Heretic. Best Actor also went to a double: Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller's alternating performances in Danny Boyle's Frankenstein. The hottest ticket was probably for Josie Rourke's Much Ado about Nothing, which fielded David Tennant and Catherine Tate as Benedick and Beatrice.

There was, unusually, competition for that title from an art exhibition -- the gap between demand and supply at the National Gallery's Leonardo da Vinci exhibition meaning that tickets turned up on eBay with fearsome mark-ups. There wasn't a show to match it for hype or displayed masterpieces. But Tate Liverpool's Magritte retrospective and the Royal Academy's Degas exhibition were models of intelligent curation. Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter show beautifully displayed the range of his art. Sometimes, though, it isn't the show you remember but a single moment in it. In my year, coming across Anthony Caro's sculpture Whispering at the United Enemies show at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, had as much impact as whole blockbusters in other galleries.

The cloud's still thick, though, and Hugo offers one illustration of why. What would have featured in a Paris review of the cultural year 1902? Perhaps the writer would have mentioned Georges Méliès' sensational novelty Le Voyage dans la lune, but I bet it would have been in tones of mild condescension and not as the starting point of a great 20th-century art form. Only now can we clearly see what it meant. This year, returning to the present, it happened to be a sequel that broke the record for box-office take, earning $1bn in 16 days. But it wasn't a movie or the latest volume of a successful children's book; it was a video game – Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. A salient bulge or just negligible vapour? Right now, I'm not sure I can see far enough to tell.