I was a bit disappointed this year, it was pretty bland, even in the semis. Certainly over here in the land of Nul Points, where we rarely have a realistic chance of even coming in the top half let alone winning, the only reason to pay it any heed is because it's a guilty pleasure of musical silliness, especially in the semi finals. Or at least, it was...
I'm quite glad that Greece did well, and that Bulgaria at least made it to the final, but sadly Bosnia (another downright loopy entry) were knocked out. And although we (UK) did alright with a decent tune, and the winner was actually pretty good (with the added bonuses of actually being a nice person AND looking like Emma Watson), she did still belong to the huge group of "people desperately trying to sound like Shakira for some reason", a recent Eurovision phenom that's starting to grate just a bit. Along with the emo hipsters, sub-"Europe" level late 80s rock, and random male voice choirs or warbly women standing around in white dresses.
Other interesting developments are the introduction of some kind of popstep (it's not really "proper" dubstep; there's a hint of polyrhythmicality and some unusual instrumentation, but little in the way of a proper drop, mashed up samples or truly wild synth noises), a drift from 80s hair rock to 90s indie/baggy (there was one act who I swear were an Early Primal Scream covers band who got distracted by the Happy Mondays coming on the radio when they were searching for ideas), and a growing trend towards the reintroduction of "proper" pop music acts as representatives (Tyler, Cascada, etc). If my Nan was bothered to watch it any more (she's a huge Abba fan, partly from their 70s/80s Eurovision outings), I think she would be in turn disturbed, confused, and encouraged by these.
Besides the winner, and Greece being somewhere in the top 10, I couldn't easily pick any of the other frontrunners from each other, they all merged together into one stodgy mass where, once again, the music itself was secondary to all the political bloc voting - I was able to predict certain countries' top choices with decent accuracy, simply because it was bloody obvious they would do that as they ALWAYS vote that way, regardless of quality. I'm kind of tempted to make up a series of maps showing the points relationships between countries - both who they awarded 1 thru 12 points _to_, and where they received points _from_.
(Mind you, it was pleasing to see that Denmark won out with relatively few 8, 10 and 12 point awards - they instead received a lot of solid 5, 6 and 7 point votes from a great majority of the voting countries, whereas the also-rans got plentiful 10s and 12s from their immediate neighbours and "friends", but very little from anyone else...)
Ireland deserved to come last, though. I'm sorry, that song was just dire, god only knows how it got through the semis.
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