As for our winner, I was actually pleasant surprised that Duncan Laurence's Arcade was the clear victor of the night with an impressive 498 points overall. The bisexual singer's song might not have been as flashy as previous winning entries but it was a rather solid pop song that has improved with further listens. Rounding off the Top 5 winners were Italy at number 2 and 472 points with Mahmood's Soldi while number 3 was Russia getting 370 points as Sergey Lazarev (who previously entered the contest in 2016) performing Scream. In fourth position was Switzerland getting 364 points with Luca Hänni's She Got Me and in fifth place was Sweden at 334 points with John Lundvik's Too Late For Love. Lundvik also represented the UK's entry by writing Michael Rice's song, Bigger Than Us, which fared poorly by getting last place in the contest with 11 points.
As for the presenters we've gone from an all male pairing from a previous year and an all female pairing from last year to an evenly split male/female pairing for this particular outing of the contest. The presenters in question being Erez Tal, Bar Refaeli, Assi Azar and Lucy Ayoub. I do sometimes wonder if four presenters, even for a lengthy event like this is one presenter too many but in all fairness, I do think they all worked well together, with the contestants and in general with keeping the audience engaged throughout the night. Maybe not as iconic as Mans Zelmerlow and Petra Made but who can be, right?
Speaking of Mans, I do find it rather charming that despite winning the show back in 2015, he still manages to find a way to be involved (and even on his Instagram he joked about showing up next year as well). This time around he was paired with four other former winners - Conchita Wurst, Eleni Foureira, Verka Serduchka and Gali Atari performing some past hits along with a version of Halleujah. Their performance was a lot more entertaining to watch than the two song piece we got with Madonna, which was nothing short of a car crash to watch. Much as I love the contest getting iconic and LGBT friendly artists to perform on the show, Madonna's bits were deserving of the criticism it overall generated on the night.
Mixed performances aside, there was also a political protest aspect to this year as well with many people on social media refusing to watch due to the current situation in Israel, despite the event bagging over 182 million viewers worldwide. I stayed out of the political discussion on social media and to be honest, if you didn't watch it for political reasons that's perfectly fine but trying to guilt trip or shame people who did watch it, I did find rather annoying. This sort of attitude on social media rarely to never actually helps anyone and it felt like some were trying to score brownie points than sensibly raise an important issue. Other than that, not the best year but decent enough though and as a DCEU fan, I was also happy to see Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot for about three minutes during the ad/spoof segments of the night.
Duncan Laurence - Arcade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eztx7Wr8PtE
Next year's Netherlands turn to broadcast the event. See you all in 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment