It's the time of year for critics to begin throwing bouquets at Hollywood instead of barbs. "Ten Best" lists are as thick as westerns, and every '51 film is being dissected to find its good points instead of its bad. Not to be outdone, we have a few flowers to fling ourselves.

First, to the movie industry as a whole which certainly tried to live up to its promise of 1950--the year when movies had hit an all-time low--that movies would be better than ever. Spurred by the competition of television, more imagined than real, the big studios attempted to climb out of their ruts of plot, technique, and star systems and did succeed in producing some acceptable film.

Certain individual scenes stand out: Gregory Peck's reading of the 23rd psalm in "David and Bathsheba"; the entire first half of "The Well," which showed a race riot being born; the scene in "A Streetcar Named Desire" where Marlon Brando shouts for his wife after he has beaten her; the ballet sequence that provided the finale for "An American in Paris"; Vincent Price and a boatful of Mexican police sinking into the bay with Price standing in the bow--cloak tossed over his shoulders--in "His Kind of Woman"; Alec Guinness descending the subway steps near the end of "The Lavender Hill Mob" to the music of a rhumba band, as the scene changes to South America climaxing Guinness' flight with the subtle relief of his escape; Elizabeth Taylor visiting Montgomery Clift's prison cell in "A Place in the Sun"; the Indian dance done by Radha in "The River"; Audie Murphy's return to his camp and comrades, after he ran away from the battle in "The Red Badge of Courage"; the time-sequence shots of flowers opening in the spring in Walt Disney's "Nature's Half Acre"; and finally the scene in Walter Slezak's kitchen where he and Cary Grant discuss how science has wrung the beauty out of living, especially eating, in "People Will Talk."