As it is the season of goodwill, Maggoty Lamb devotes his – or her – latest dispatch from the frontline of music journalism to handing out some end-of-year awards, and is pretty nice to everyone, except perhaps the Guardian

As if the opportunity to disagree with music journalists' year-end top 10s on an individual basis was not evidence enough of a new post-Leveson era of media accountability, did you know that the deliberations of the Uncut music award judging panel are now available online? This is certainly exciting news for anyone liable to be horribly gripped by the spectacle of Stewart Lee succumbing (perhaps not for the first time) to his inner indie snob while Linda Thompson bravely tries to talk some sense into him re Bill Callahan's Apocalypse. OK, perhaps that's just me then.

In the planning stages of our own inaugural rival ceremony, there was excited talk of assembling the ultimate reality TV talent jury to compete with Uncut's all-star line up (Tony Wadsworth, Mark Cooper … with these industry heavyweights you are spoiling us), incorporating breakout X Factor mentor Tulisa, America's Next Top Model and American Vogue's Andre Leon Talley, Michel Roux Jr's gimlet-eyed consigliere Monica Galleti, and Strictly's Bruno Tonioli. Sadly the budget just wasn't there, but rest assured all decisions have been made in hopes of approximating the ones Andre, Tulisa, Monica and Bruno might have come to, and the number of categories has been kept down to five so as not to be endlessly boring like the Grammys.

1. Best Fall interview

Robert Chalmers's superb extended encounter with Mark E Smith in the Independent on Sunday wins this one hands down – not only for 2011 but perhaps in perpetuity. What our celebrity judges would have loved the most about this piece was the way Chalmers captures the overlap between four closely related but not entirely identical Mark E Smiths – the one in the band, the one in books, the one who speaks to you while you are interviewing him, and the one who actually lives in the world. Imagine if that illustrious quartet were to form a band called the … oh well, maybe not.

An honourable mention in this category might also have gone to the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, had American linguistic convention not obliged him to write "The Fall is … ". If ever there was a band to challenge the primacy of the plural collective noun in Anglophone pop, you'd think (given the number of different individual destinies that ensemble has yoked to the expression of one man's artistic will) it would be The Fall. So the enduring preferability of "The Fall are … " confirms this particular round of rock's neverending transatlantic tug of war as a home win for the colonial motherland.

2. Best 180-degree turnaround, year on year

A runaway victory for the NME's Cool List. Last year's winner: chunky knitwear poster-girl Laura Marling. This year, it's super-sweary Azealia Banks. Come 2012, Derek and Clive or GG Allin may well be in with a posthumous shout.

3. Most consistently provocative use of the star system

The prize in this very competitive category goes to the Guardian's own Alex Macpherson, for following up 2010's visionary two-star dismissal of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an even bolder "Texas" (as lecturers in music journalism technically term the lone-star review) for Drake's Take Care. Imagine if Macpherson and his celestial points scheme had been around in the 1960s, how the narrow critical consensus could have been opened up by giving one star to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited ("Why's he have to go back there again? Can't he just move on like the Hollies have") or the Beatles' Revolver ("They're just going round in circles … the new Cilla Black blows these weak-ass pseudo-scousers out of the water").

4. Most imaginative seasonal feature

Faced with the choice of paying for a well-thought-through opinion piece by an alleged expert in the field, or getting an intern to ring the drummer from Dodgy and ask him what his three best X Factor singles are, all too many commissioning editors these days take the latter option. So our judges could not have helped but be won over by the trouble taken by plucky journalistic underdogs The Stool Pigeon in assembling their Christmas issue's surrealist game of literary consequences, incorporating contributions from Richard Hell, EMA, him out of Fucked Up, Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno (disruptive as ever) and a hilariously off-beam John Foxx, alongside the aforementioned Bill Callahan and Mark E Smith.

5. Best collective recovery from a potentially devastating psychological blow

The springtime publication of editorial mainstay Simon Reynolds's Retromania represented a stern examination of The Wire's esprit de corps. Here was the most eminent standard-bearer of that magazine's long-established neophiliac tendency, launching a savage (and, in my opinion, rather unfair) attack on himself for an entire career spent boosting inferior contemporary product in a desperate bid for aesthetic parity with those lucky enough to have been born five or 15 years earlier. (At least, that's what I think he means by: "Mustering all my resources of belief and optimism in an unconscious drive to cast aside that feeling of belatedness common to my generation: the negative birthright of all those who missed as a conscious participant, the 60s or punk.")

A lady does not like to be too specific about her age, but as a fellow member of Reynolds's approximate generational cohort, I personally think this mindset demonstrates a very narrow historical perspective. Rather than being upset about missing Eater or Herman's Hermits in their pomp, wouldn't it be more appropriate to feel gratitude for not having had to fight in the first world war or go to work in a Manchester cotton mill at the tender age of eight? But whether or not you accept its chronological rationale, Reynolds's unexpected mea culpa clearly had serious ideological implications for The Wire.

Reading the first couple of issues of the magazine after Reynolds's bombshell dropped was a bit like I'd imagine going to see Motorhead would be if a story had just broken about Lemmy swapping his hoard of dubious militaria for a collection of Sylvanian Families. But once The Wire began to process the shock, something entirely unexpected and really quite wonderful started to happen.

From a timely and well-executed Roy Harper cover through David Toop on the Beach Boys' Smile sessions, Byron Coley on Albert Ayler and the December issue's excellent pieces on Turkish psychedelia and kraut-rocker-turned-electro-minimalist-pioneer Manuel Göttsching, the magazine seems to have used Simon Reynolds's Jerry Maguire-style mission statement as a cue to recalibrate its troubled relationship with the past. Like a vaccine that contains a little bit of the illness, Retromania has inoculated The Wire against retrophobia. And if that's not a happy ending Charles Dickens could be proud of – and to which our notional judging panel can raise their glasses with a suitably heartwarming seasonal toast of "God bless us, every one" – I don't know what is.