Eurovision 2009

The Eurovision Song Contest finals were last Saturday. Although I've blogged about Eurovision before, the dearth of bloggable material suggests to me that one more post can't hurt.

Everything I want to say has probably been said more succinctly here at the Onion AV club. While I only caught 1/3 of the acts, overall, my impression was that the contest wasn't as fun as in 2007 -- the last time I watched/blogged it. Possibly, the more outrageous (and, therefore, more entertaining) of acts get weeded out in the semi-finals. I, again, missed some of the first acts, but here are my thoughts with accompanying YouTube vidoes.

The winners:

1st place, Norway. The friend who watched the show with me was a fan and it was the winner by far, but I can't say I agree. As far as Eurovision goes, however, at least respectable.



2nd place, Iceland. I missed this song during the live broadcast. Listening now -- boring but not embarrassing. Could actually be something you'd hear on the radio. The dolphins are kind of stupid.



3rd place, Azerbaijian. Huh. While they were tallying up the results, I was thinking that Azerbaijian was a different song, so clearly it didn't make that big of an impression.



Others:

Albania. Seriously, dancing mimes? And I'm not even going to touch the issue of the green dancing guy. I have no words for the confusion this song causes me.



Sweden. I've never seen an act do the pop-song/opera thing successfully. This is no exception.



Greece. I like the way the platform rises at the end to reveal a Greek flag.



Bosnia & Herzegovina. The costumes, the costumes! Even though I linked it before, I must quote the AV Club: "Without Eurovision, you might never have known that the look in Bosnia right now is very touring-production-of-Les-Miz."



Malta. This was my friend's second-favorite. She has a nice voice.



Estonia. When I watched live, we missed her playing the violin she holds for the entire song. I counted, and she plays for exactly 10 seconds at 2:35.



Romania. I cannot understand what she's singing (it is in English, I think), but it nearly has a hook and in terms of disposable summer pop song with hot dancing girls, I don't see how this 19th place is worse than 4th place Turkey.



Turkey. 4th place.



UK. The UK got tired of their terrible showing (see their hilariously ridiculous 2007 entry!), so they got Andrew Lloyd Webber to compose a song for them. It did much better and it's terribly boring.



Finland. Finnish rapping (in English).