Sixteen countries competed in Tuesday's semi-final of the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest. Which ones will continue to party in Saturday's Grand Final?<!--more-->
The 60th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest got underway in Vienna, Austria Tuesday, with 16 countries competing for ten spots in the Grand Final taking place on Saturday.
The show opened with last year's champion (and this year's green room hostess) Conchita Wurst reprising her winning song Rise Like a Phoenix. After introductions, the Contest began in earnest with hot cops from Moldova, inclusive punk from Finland, confidence boosts from Serbia, and ending with interesting vocabulary from Georgia. After votes from juries and viewers in the participating and designated((Austria, France, Spain, and special guest Australia)) countries, these are the ten that advanced to Saturday's Grand Final:
If you checked out our predictions post from earlier today, you would see we did a pretty good job in identifying nine of the ten qualifiers.((Not to be too smug, but I got 10/10 in my personal rankings.)) Our one miss was selecting Belarus over Romania. With our process, we rated Belarus quite high in our April rankings though rehearsal footage seemed to indicate a subdued performance. Unfortunately, the actual performance underwhelmed but our methodology caused the song to rank to high to fall out of favor. With Romania, the song never really latched on. However, the rehearsals indicated the song "De la capat (All Over Again)" played better live, which likely worked in Romania's favor. Also, do not doubt the power of the Romanian diaspora, particularly when the song is explicitly about the Romanian diaspora.
Other items of note:
- Greece, Romania, and Russia all maintain their perfect streak of appearing in Eurovision.
- Hungary may have played the spoiler for a number of Eurovision pools. The bookmakers, the press, and YouTube viewers did not have the song in their top 10, and it was also our bubble pick. This is the country's fifth-straight qualification since returning to the Contest in 2011.
- Armenia, Belgium, Estonia and Serbia will perform in the first half of Saturday's Grand Final. Albania, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Romania, and Russia will perform in the second half.
The second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest will take place Thursday at 9pm CET / 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific. You can catch up with Tuesday's semi-final and watch Thursday's semi-final live (and with International Sign Language interpretation!) on the Eurovision YouTube channel.