The Social Network “takes [Facebook’s] success story and turns it into art,” says Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, “[in] much the same way Orson Welles took the story of William Randolph Hearst and turned it into Citizen Kane. Was it really Hearst’s story? Not exactly. Is it an American story? Absolutely.

“Sorkin is on fire with this script. There is not a fatty piece presented, not a glossed-over sappy moment. It turns out that his collaboration with Fincher is a match. Fincher’s coldness and Sorkin’s passion are combustible. Both are obsessive compulsive with their projects and have harnessed their collective fervor into a story about a similar obsessive.

“For parts of this thing, you might feel like you can’t breathe. It’s a heavy-metal song. It’s an aria. It’s a two-hour drum solo. And it doesn’t let up.”

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin “hold up a mirror that says ‘this is who we are in 2010.’ Or maybe this is who we are, period.”

I’ll go Stone one better. The awards-season progress (or failure) of The Social Network is going to be significantly determined by generational favoritism. This is the first big-time award-calibre movie about GenY types, and is brought alive on-screen mostly by GenY actors. There will be many who’ll get that this film represents not just a kind of generational self-portraiture — a very significant one at that — but also forecasts a cultural sea-change in Hollywood. It’s a movie that says “the game belongs to us now.” I haven’t developed (i.e., refined) this thought to its proper distillation, but I know I’m onto something here.

The only people, I suspect, who are not going to get on the Social Network train are the pre-cyber, still-don’t-get-it 60-and-overs. A significant percentage of this group will support The Social Network, of course, because they don’t want to risk being seen as out-of-it (and therefore less employable). The hold-outs, I suspect, will rally round The King’s Speech, which is a fine film for what it is. But it’s not as important as The Social Network.