Eurovision Preliminary predictions: update

Well the prelim is in 4 days, and I arrive in Istanbul the day after. Can you say “excited”?

I knew you could.

Last week in this entry I gave the following as my picks to qualify for the 10 spots in the final:

Lithuania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Malta, Serbia, Denmark, Ukraine, Cyprus, Greece and Croatia

There’s been a few days of rehearsals for the preliminaries already, and so far my feedback gives me confidence in most of my predictions. Based on feedback from various websites about ESC, the following are performance rankings, based on their rehearsal performances:

Strong: Cyprus, Serbia, Ukraine, plus Israel
Better each time: Lithuania, Bosnia, Denmark plus Albania, Monaco and Slovenia
Inconsistent: Macedonia, Malta, Greece plus Belarus and Estonia
OK but not grabbing: Croatia plus Finland, Latvia, Andorra and Netherlands
Bad: Switzerland, Portugal

This gives me confidence in most of my predictions--so far. But could Alabanie, Monaco or Slovenia sneak in, at the expense of Croatia, Malta, Macedonia or Greece?

I think Greece is safe--it’s a great track--but the rest, dunno. When the results are announced on Wed, we don’t get the rankings of the 10 qualifies, we just know who qualified. Effectively 2nd or 10th won’t matter. And some acts that get in based on an unique or gimmicky performance will lose that momentum.