Super Bowl - A - Ganza

The game gets an A or at the very least a solid B+; close contest unlike many of the over-by-the-third-quarter contests that have sometimes happened. If this is going to be the last football game we see until August, it's a fine way to go out.

The halftime show is a B- or maybe a C. Madonna pretty much had to pull out "Vogue," since it's her most recent ubiquitous hit -- much of her career-establishing work from the mid-80s might not even be known to a 2012 audience. And there's something a little pathetic about a woman north of 50 singing "Like a Virgin." "Like a Prayer" was a good choice because of the ability to work in a choir, which adds to the spectacle. Although the Material One still knows how to command a stage, she had said she was nursing a bum leg and that may have slowed her down. She gets a downgrade for trying some moves that probably should have been written out if her leg was indeed that much of a hindrance. The show itself gets a downgrade from the inexplicable presence of Nikki Minaj, Cee-Lo Green and M.I.A. The presence of an "electro-pop" duo that calls itself LMFAO was apparently a satirical jab at the entire idea of a halftime show since they are demonstrably without talent, charisma or reason for being on my TV screen.

The commercials? For a long time we have been told that Super Bowl commercials are something special and it may be that the hype has oversold the quality. A lot of them were cute, but the idea of watching them over and over and over again? Probably not. Once the joke's been told, it's not all that funny the second time. The Budweiser hockey spot was nice and was one of the two commercials I noticed really draw people's attention. I was actually watching a lot of the game at a restaurant and the only other commercial that actually caused conversation to drop and draw people's eyes to the screen was Clint Eastwood's "Halftime in America" commercial for Chrysler. I'm pretty sure that had more to do with Clint's imposing presence and gravelly voice than with a car company that, along with General Motors, caused almost $24 billion to vanish from the public coffers over the last three years. Other than that, I liked the commercials for John Carter and The Avengers, probably because I really want to see those movies.