Eurovision

Today I watched the final of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, streamed live from the Oberlin language lab! This was an enormous performance, as expected. Even with with the quick changes between songs and relatively fast score announcements, the show clocked in at around three hours and 15 minutes.

The show began with a performance by Cirque du Soleil, which morphed into Eurovision 2008’s winner Dima Bilan singing last year’s winning song “Believe”. Lithuania was the first entry to take the stage, giving the contest a sort of somber start. Next came Israel, with a decent performance, followed by an intense solo French performance. Fourth came Sweden with the strongest vocals of the competition thus far, though I continued to dislike the song. Next was Croatia with perhaps the most improved performance over the duration of the competition, though it still pretty mediocre. Portugal was sixth with an overall strong performance. Iceland followed with a strong vocal performance, and then came the high-energy Greek entry. Ninth was Armenia with an upbeat, strong show, which was contrasted by the intense and depressing Russian entry. Eleventh was Azerbaijan, with surprisingly decent vocals compared to previous live performances, which was followed by the mediocre song from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moldova offered a highly energetic performance to close out the first half of the contest.

Malta continued into the second half of performances with a strong vocal performance of an otherwise boring entry. Estonia, while musically strong, did not offer as flashy a performance as previous entries, which made it less appealing to the general audience. Denmark was sixteenth, with an enthusiastic, if weak, vocal performance. If the contest had solely been based off of how tight the pants of the lead singer were, Germany would certainly have won, though since the overall performance lacked energy, it didn’t end up being one of the stronger performances, as expected. Turkey followed with an overall strong performance, followed by Albania’s entry, which was just as weird and creepy as the semi-final performance. Norway performed twentieth, also with an overall strong performance. Ukraine’s performance was once again just out of control and ridiculous, though it was probably the most elaborate and entertaining of the show. Romania followed with a mediocre performance, followed by the United Kingdom with an overall strong vocal performance and cameo by Anderw Lloyd Weber on piano. Finland was second to last with an energetic performance packed with fire, though the song was just as awful as ever. Spain concluded the performances with a decent, engertic performance.

Following all the performances, Europe at large was given 15 minutes to vote. During this time, multiple recaps of the show were broadcast–the first few performances seemed so distant by the end of the show and with so many entries, it was hard to keep track of all of them. My favorites of the night were Amenia, Moldova, Estonia, and Portugal, with my continued love/hate relationship with the Ukrainian entry.

Once the voting period was over and as the scores were tallied, Cirque du Soliel offered another performance, though this one was really strange, involving people dancing around in water. After about 10 minutes of this, the votes started coming in. Each country had a representative announce the country’s results, which were added to the score board as the results came in. Given that there were 42 countries voting, this process took a little while to get through. Pretty early on Norway took a large point lead, though the other top spots were much closer. Once all of the countries’ results were announced the final placement was confirmed:

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Azerbaijan
4. Turkey
5. United Kingdom
6. Estonia
7. Greece
8. France
9. Bosnia and Herzegovina
10. Armenia
11. Russia
12. Ukraine
13. Denmark
14. Moldova
15. Portugal
16. Israel
17. Albania
18. Croatia
19. Romania
20. Germany
21. Sweden
22. Malta
23. Lithuania
24. Spain
25. Finland

Considering it’s currently the middle of the night in Europe, I’m going to wait to read about reactions to the contest until tomorrow, by which time I’m sure there will be a bunch of news articles and message board posts about the results. I was surprised a little by the results; Turkey and Greece didn’t do as well as expected, and Bosnia and Herzegovina made it into the top 10. I wonder how the new jury vote contribution to each country’s results affected the voting. The juries had a lot of influence on their country’s votes, and I think if it was done again solely by televoting, the results would have been much different (for example, Turkey probably would have placed 2nd and Greece 3rd). I also think some of the stronger entries from the first half of the show would have placed better if they had performed later in the contest–I think the general audience had pretty much fogotten entries like Lithuania and Sweden by the time the Spain was performing.

Tomorrow I’ll make one or two final posts about Europe’s reactions, as well as some final thoughts of my own after tracking this contest for the past month.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.