Now that we are nearly a month into 2006, many of you are beginning to wonder what exactly was hot in the last year. Was that iPod worth it? Did you really need an XBOX 360? Was “King Kong” really the best movie?

Well, my friends, let’s take a glimpse back into the past and see what was hot, and what was not.

According to Rebecca Murray from about.com, 2005 was “a lousy year for movies”. Still, she managed to put together a list of the best movies for 2005. “Brokeback Mountain” tops the list, followed by “King Kong”, “Good Night, and Good Luck”, “Capote”, “The Constant Gardner”, “The Upside of Anger”, “Batman Begins”, “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, “Crash” and “Rent”. And then Murray does something she says is a first for her: puts together a “Worst of” list. These were her picks for the worst movies of 2005: “A Sound of Thunder”, “House of D”, “Lords of Dogtown”, “Undiscovered”, “The Island”, “Valiant”, “The Underclassman”, “Son of the Mask”, “Stealth” and “Dark Water”.

What about TV? Did Desperate Housewives make the top pick for 2005? According to time.com, ScFi’s remake of Battlestar Galactica actually takes the prize for best TV show of 2005. This is followed by NBC’s The Office, Showtime’s Weeds, HBO’s Sometimes in April, Bravo’s Project Runway, MTV2’s Wonder Showzen, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, FOX’s Prison Break and a tie for the 10 spot between UPN’s Everybody Hates Chris and NBC’s My Name is Earl.

Of course, there were the gadgets that people stood in line for hours to get. BusinessWeek compiled a list of the 40 best products of 2005. Making there was onto that list were the following: the Nokia N90 cell phone, Nintendogs video game, the XBOX 360, Kodak EasyShare-One camera, Plantronics Discovery 640 Bluetooth headset, Sony’s Digital Music System, One-time-use Video Camrecorder, Apple iPod Nano, Atari Flashback 2 game console and SudaCare Shower Soothers tablets, among others.

Don’t forget the music! AT billboard.com, you can check out what the hottest albums of the year were. My Morning Jacket leads the pack with Z, The Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang and M.I.A.’s Arular tie for second, The New Pornographers come in third with Twin Cinema, Common’s Be grabs the fourth spot, The Woods by Sleater-Kinney is number five, Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois is at number six, the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane’s At Carnegie Hall and Queens of the Stone Age Lullabies to Paralyze are tied at number seven, Gimme Fiction from Spoon is at number eight, In Between Dreams from Jack Johnson and The Emancipation of Mimi from Mariah Carey are sharing the number nine spot, and John Legend’s Get Lifted rounds out the list at number 10.

As we look back on 2005, we can only hope that we can learn from our mistakes, and pray that out new XBOX 360 doesn’t overheat.