It’s kinda hard to judge a screenplay by watching the resultant film without reading the actual screenplay. But I’ll do my best here to strip away the director’s gorgeous choices, the actors’ brilliant human touches, and the rest of the crew’s awesome work, so I can focus on the movie’s spine: the script. (Keep in mind I have not yet seen the usual late-in-the-year Oscar bait, such as Precious, Up in the Air, or Nine, or highly praised smaller movies, like The Hurt Locker.)

Below is my list of 2009′s Best Produced Screenplays:

1. Up
Written by Bob Peterson & Pete Docter
The first three on my list are all running neck and neck and neck for the top spot, but ultimately, I had to give it to Up, this funny, emotional, unpredictable, and technically brilliant animated film from (where else?) Pixar Studios. It has everything a near-perfect screenplay should have: real (and really flawed) characters, realistic (yet witty) dialogue, strong (and strongly motivated) villains, and a believable character arc (there’s two actually, one for each of the main characters). Who knew a cartoon about a senior citizen and a chubby kid in a balloon-powered floating house would be so riveting?

2. District 9
Written by Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell
“Wow.” That was my first impression after seeing this movie. Smart on so many levels and wholly different from anything Hollywood could ever hope to produce, District 9 is a ticking time-bomb of a story: it starts off like a real-life documentary about alien refugees, sprints off like an action movie on fire, and ends with one cataclysmic sci-fi bang that leaves you blown away.

3. Avatar
Written by James Cameron
James Cameron’s screenplay for this year’s most anticipated film and history’s most expensive movie ever is by no means subtle. But it does exactly what a good script should do: act as the solid blueprint for an amazingly sound yet beautiful cinematic monolith to be built upon. From paying off small first-act setups to putting a 22nd-Century twist on cliched elements, the Avatar story is breathtaking, intense, and otherworldly — it reminds us of the very reasons we go to the cinema in the first place.

4. Star Trek
Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
Director J.J. Abrams is a pop-culture God. Just look at his recent credits. And his re-imagining of the original Star Trek series was a pretty damn good balance between appeasing the Trekkers and Trekkies (depending on your level of geekdom) and telling a suspenseful, witty, and action-packed sci-fi opera for the newbies. But it’s really the screenwriting duo of Orci & Kurtzman who should share in the glory. Though their screenplay has a few flaws ([spoiler until the end of the parenthesis] why the Hell does Kirk go from ensign to captain of the Enterprise in less than a day???), its solid structure is what allowed Abrams to pull off the sacrilegious move of remaking a classic.

5. Inglourious Basterds
Written by Quentin Tarantino
This historical fantasy made a big splash because it was Quentin Tarantino’s return to form, his entree back into pop-culture consciousness after the dismal performance of his half of Grindhouse, Death Proof. Unique anti-heroes (a band of covert U.S. Army Jews infiltrating Nazi-occupied France), long-winded monologues, and the most delicious villain we’ve seen in a long time. Sure some of his scenes needed to be trimmed (the pub scene was way too long!) and the alternate-history ending didn’t sit well with me, but overall, Inglourious Basterds was one of the most unique screenplays of the year and one of the most enjoyable movies.

6. Taken
Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
A stellar example of how a script with a simple premise -– Liam Neeson plays an ex-CIA agent who must find his daughter’s kidnappers in France -— can result in a tight, suspenseful thriller so long as the execution is done right.

7. The Hangover
Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore
There was no single funnier movie in 2009 than The Hangover. Lucas and Moore take the tired “bachelor party in Vegas” subgenre, put a subtle Memento-like slant on it, and deliver one of the most jaw-droppingly, surprisingly hilarious films of the year.

8. The Blind Side
Written by John Lee Hancock
I usually don’t fall for the based-on-a-true-story, tear-jerking, feel-good dramas, but this Sandra Bullock-starring football movie took me by surprise. Why? Because the screenplay had well-rounded characters and a simple but effective plotline — all causing you to empathize with the main character. An effective family-friendly drama if ever there were one this year.

Honorable Mentions:

• Paranormal Activity
• I Love You, Man
• Watchmen
• The International

But will it be at the top of the top? I don’t think so — most sci-fi movies are never seen in the same class as tear-jerking dramas or period-piece epics. But it certainly deserves all of the critical acclaim and box-office receipts ($103 million to date in the U.S. alone) it’s received so far.

If you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it, District 9 is a “hugantically” unique and amazingly realistic take on the aliens-landing-on-Earth genre. In it, a huge mothership arrives and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. For 28 years. Nothing comes out. No one goes in. It just floats there, above the city … for nearly three decades.

Then, the government decides it has waited long enough for our visitors to show themselves, so they send in a crew to break into the spaceship. Inside, they don’t find big-eyed bald-headed aliens with massive death rays or slimy creatures ready to take over the world. Instead, they find malnourished drone aliens who have been left to their own devices after their leaders mysteriously die off.

So, the MNU (Multi-National United, a sort of corporate take on the United Nations) set up temporary housing for the aliens in the ghettos of Johannesburg. Soon enough, this area becomes even worse than the worst of the city’s slums, rampant with crime and pollution, as the creatures (known pejoratively as “prawns”) multiple in the millions. The locals become disenchanted with their trash-eating, resource-consuming non-human neighbors, and eventually segregation is the only solution.

MNU’s long-term answer to the non-human infestation is to round up all the aliens in District 9 and move them to a “bigger and better” area outside of J’burg away from humans.

The man in charge of this operation is Wikus (pronounced “Vickers”), a highly intelligent but bumbling bureaucrat. But when he accidentally exposes himself to their biotechnology, Wikus might very well become the one who frees them from their terrestrial oppression. And so begins his heroic story arc, which doesn’t quite end the way Hollywood’s screenwriting conventions would have you believe.

It starts off methodically — slow, some would say — with a documentary style. But then it begins to pick up the pace in the second act until the movie’s moving at such a clip that it’s a full-out action movie.

That’s largely because this beautifully-crafted script — by director Neill Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell — is not only groundbreaking in its combination of heady human themes like apartheid with genre elements such as invading aliens, it’s also an intentional “F*ck You” to Microsoft and the Hollywood studio system.

You see, Oscar-winner Peter Jackson (of The Lord of the Rings fame) had been hired on to produce the movie adaptation of the ginormous hit video game Halo, which was produced by Microsoft and Bungie. Jackson handpicked commercial director Blomkamp to helm the project.

Blomkamp, born and raised in J’burg and a graduate of the Vancouver Film School in Canada, made his mark as a 3-D animator and as a director for several smart commercials. But Microsoft and the studios funding the project bristled at the thought of a then-26-year-old directing their flagship project. Blomkamp even made a series of brilliant Halo short movies to prove what he could do.

Still, the “brilliant” folks in charge of the movie balked, and the project stalled. So Jackson and Blomkamp decided to buck the studio system and just create a movie they wanted to see themselves, outside of executive committees tampering with their creative juices. The result — District 9, a $30-million independent film from South Africa that has since gone on to gross more than triple its budget and no doubt put a little bit of egg on the face of Microsoft and the studios involved with that Halo project.

With a we-don’t-need-’em attitude, a brilliant script, and solid CGI, District 9 is easily one of the best films of the year.