Commentary: It’s time we stop caring about Super Bowl ads. For now, we’ll always have Cookie Monster

I write this on Super Bowl Sunday, a day known for football, a halftime show, and — for purposes of the present discussion — television commercials. On Wednesday, the Golden Globe nominations were announced, and the reason I mention this is that the Globes perform a similar sort of trick, wherein a promotional dog wags a journalistic tail, making a news story out of a commercial strategy. Chosen by 90 variously active members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Globes are by any real critical or sociological standard meaningless, except as an expression of what those 90 people are thinking, or not thinking. And yet the press, which both creates and feeds off public interest in these things, rose early, as it does every year, to note the nominations as they were announced and hunt up the nominees for reactions and think about what it has to say about Life and Art and Hollywood. We are here to farm