Random Thoughts About This Year's Eurovision

1. It was always going to end that way. The juries would do their thing but they had to know that nothing they decided was going to matter. Ukraine was going to win on pure sentiment – a combination of support for an embattled nation and a collective “fuck you” to Putin’s Russia and its barbarism. I understood this going in and on that level I supported it (and their song was pretty good, it has to be said), but I did feel bad for the other performers who must have known from the beginning that they were only competing for silver.

2. That said, it was much the same festival of joyful what-the-fuckery that it was last year, for the most part. Moldova’s cheerful combination of the Ramones and polka was perhaps the highlight of that aspect of the show. Norway’s “Give That Wolf a Banana” was a close second but lost points with me for being just a bit too determined to be weird. Moldova just let the weirdness flow.

3. I loved how they got some of last year’s acts to report the jury decisions from their countries – especially how Lithuania convinced the 2021 “What Did I Just Watch” award winner to announce their votes. He did the hand gestures and everything.

4. I am seriously out of touch with the sort of people who watch Eurovision, it seems. Six of my top eight songs ended up in the bottom half of the results, including poor Germany which put up a solid rock song after the aggravated silliness of last year (that I also, nearly alone in the world it seems, enjoyed) and came in dead last. My clear and obvious winner, Belgium, with a great R&B number that apparently few besides me thought highly of, came in 19th, and the fact that Lithuania’s torch song only came in 14th is a travesty of Biblical proportions. My highest ranked favorite, Sweden, came in 4th.

5. At least nobody got skunked like last year. It was rather endearing listening to the UK delegation chanting “We got points! We got points!” when the first results were announced, and the fact that they came in second overall – rather higher than I would have had them, but so be it – was kind of fun. The guy they had singing this year could actually sing, which helps.

6. On the other hand, the only song in the contest that I actively disliked – whatever that was that Serbia contributed – came in 5th, which tells me that the one who is Clearly Not Getting It is me and not the Serbs. Oh well. I wasn’t cool when I was young and cared and I suppose it’s too late to start now.

7. In the US the event was streamed on Peacock, which decided that just letting the biggest musical show on earth, which has been successfully running for over six decades, happen the way it happens like they did last year was not good enough so they “Olympianized” it by putting Johnny Weir (of all people) in a booth in Los Angeles to provide commentary and then skipping nearly everything that happened in Turin other than the songs. On the one hand, Johnny Weir is nearly always interesting in a “train wreck of fabulousness” sort of way and he did as good a job with the situation as could reasonably be expected of anyone. On the other hand, though, his whole role was superfluous. They could have just let the actual show go on without trying to Americanize it like that.

8. I had no idea that the song that Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell made famous last year (“I can be brown, I can be blue, I can be violet skies…”) was an actual song, let alone one made famous by one of the hosts of this year’s Eurovision. See point 4 above.

9. I feel bad for Måneskin, though. Last year’s winner traditionally gets to perform at this year's Eurovision and they did a pretty good job of it considering the lead singer broke his ankle right before the final. He got through the song and then the clueless host (a different one from the one above – there were three of them) kept talking to him and backslapping him before asking him to sing something else when it was obvious to pretty much everyone else in the world watching that the poor guy was in serious pain and just wanted to get off the stage before he fell over. Get that man a damn chair!

10. Of course, the winner of this year’s Eurovision gets to host next year’s. I wonder how that will work in Kyiv, and how that will play in Moscow. Not enough popcorn in the world.