We finally made it to the end of yet another Eurovision season. Bring one the PED (post-Eurovision Depression). Rather than doing a whole review of the grand final (I think that still haven’t uploaded a recap of the second semifinal), I figure that I’ll just throw out some random thoughts and my opinions about this year’s contest. Ok . . . here goes.
-I gotta give a huge shout-out to the UK and Spain who came in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively. Why not give a shout-out to the winners of the contest as your first random thought? Over the past decade (and then some) the UK and Spain consistently have been at the bottom of the scoreboard.
I do not have the exact numbers on my right now, but Chanel (Spain) received more points this year than all of the Spanish contestants for the past 1.5 decades. Hopefully, their finish will garner more interest in the contest from potential performers. There is talk that RTVE (Spain) is going to expand Benidorm Fest, which is now Spain’s selection for Eurovision.
-I have to congratulate Ukraine on their win. While I am not super ecstatic about their win, it was awesome to see Europe (at least through the televote) stand with Ukraine. Since the final, there has been a lot of talk saying that Ukraine won only because of the Russian invasion. Ok, I’m not going to say that the invasion was the primary reason for its win, but I definitely helped. While they sent a decent song, which fused Ukrainian/Eastern European folk and rap music, I’m not sure they would have received the massive amount of televotes if the country was invaded by Russia.
-Break down of scores from the top five countries (Ukraine, the UK, Spain, Sweden, and Serbia). Full results can be found at Eurovision World
-While the contest was plagued with a lot of technical and organizational issues, I think Italy did a decent job with the final. Put it like this, if I had not been following the contest over the past few months, I would not have known any of these issues (eg the kinetic sun).
-In the same vein, I thought the hosts (Mika, Laura, and Alessandro) did a wonderful job. I have been of Laura Pausini’s music since the early 2000s, so I guess she can do no wrong in my eyes.
-LOL at this Tweet. While I did not include my favorite ESC2022 countries in my Twitter handle, my frequently used emojis list looks pretty “interesting”. Looks like I chatted quite a bit about France, Norway, Azerbaijan, the UK, Cyprus, N. Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Croatia, Latvia, Spain, Czech Republic, and Switzerland.
-Because of the massive amount of televotes that Ukraine received, it “threw” off the results a little . . . for me. I was shocked that some of my favorites received so little televotes eg Greece (57 points), the Czech Republic (5 points), and Australia (2 points).
-Jury vote shocks: I have to say that my jaw dropped when I learned that Poland received only 46 jury votes because Ochman probably was one of the best (technical) singers of this year’s contest. I think the staging and the weird camera effects with the “dementors” really hurt him. Similar male vocalists did decent with the jury vote [eg Australia (123 points) and Azerbaijan (103 points)] so it must have been the weird and distracting staging.
-While Belgium did not do THAT bad by coming in 19th place (59 jury points and 5 televotes), I was a bit disappointed with the performance. I felt like the staging and performance did not do the song any justice. To be perfectly honest, I was surprised that he made it out of the qualifying round. I know Belgium had to change the staging days before Eurovision week started, but so did all the other countries that were affected by the “faulty” stage design. The song, Miss You, is an uptempo R&B song so I expected a bit more intricate choreography. Since I recently learned that he is a professional soccer player, I think he could have handled more choreography while maintaining his vocals.
-Moldova and Serbia did a wonderful job and were the crowd favorites. This year, I watched the final at a bar and EVERYONE was dancing during Moldova’s and Serbia’s performances.
-Speaking of viewing the contest. Next year, I think I might watch the final at home. I guess Eurovision is becoming more popular in the States (or at least in NYC) so there were at least seven bars in NYC showing the final this year, which is great. Last year, I think only one or two bars showed the final. I watched the final at Hardware Bar, which was a decent spot, but there were so many people there that I could hardly hear the songs.
-While it was hard to hear the songs (especially the ballads), I did have a nice time celebrating with fellow Eurovision fans.
-I guess one benefit of watching Eurovision on the East Coast: you can rewatch the show on the same night. For us, the 4-hour contest starts at 3 pm so the show is done by 7-7:30 pm (Eastern Time). This year the husband had to work, so I rewatched it again with him at home when he arrived around 9:30 pm.
-While there was a lot of drama this year, I still really want to see a Eurovision in person. Maybe not a grand final, but definitely a semifinal or a jury show.
-While Ronela (Albania’s artist) did not make it to the final, she definitely made Eurovision interesting.
This was in response to some folks hating on her outfits for her performance.
-I was so happy that Iceland qualified. On the other side of the fence, I was quite disappointed with Cyprus’ performance. While the song is nice (IMO), unfortunately, Andromache just did not deliver vocally.
-Unfortunately, due to irregular voting patterns, six countries (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, and San Marino) from the 2nd semifinal round were DQ’d from voting in both the semifinal and the final. The weird thing is the six countries were not notified that their real votes would not be used minutes before they were supposed to announce their votes in the final. In cases of suspicious voting patterns, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) uses an aggregate scoring method. While this DQ probably would not have drastically affected the contestants in the final, I wonder if it affected who was supposed to qualify or not qualify in the 2nd semifinal.
-Countries whose live performances really elevated their songs based on my personal preferences: Denmark (those young ladies were having a blast on the stage); Azerbaijan (that vocal near the end of the song was AMAZING), Spain, the UK, Iceland, Armenia, Moldova, Romania, and even Bulgaria.
-Countries whose live performances left me underwhelmed: Poland (man, this one was one of my favorite songs), Belgium (mentioned this earlier), Norway, France, and Estonia. For me, Stefan (Estonia) was doing too much of this “let me hear you sing”. Um, YOU are here to sing . . . not the audience. This is one of my pet peeves when artists do this.
-At least we did not have to see this guy during this year’s contest.
Måns Zelmerlöw is to Eurovision as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is to the Christmas season.
-Now that Eurovision is over, I’m like my girl from Serbia: I šta ćemo sad? = What happens now?
