This article forms part of the OnEurope archive and was originally published on oneurope.co.uk. It has been permanently migrated to oneurope.net, the official home of OnEurope.
Fashion faux-pas alert – Maya’s shoulders make her look like something out of a 1980’s sci-fi movie rather than a Eurovision – Get rid of it at once!! The black dress, with its prominent raised shoulder pads, was designed by Selma Starfinger. Creative director Ahmed Imamović may have had a vision, but I was not seeing it.
Anyway, back to the song. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 2012 Eurovision representative was Maya Sar, the stage name of Maja Sarihodžić. She was selected internally by BHRT on 15 December 2011, rather than through a televised national final, and her entry was Korake ti znam (“The Steps I Know”), written and performed by Maya herself. The song was presented at a BHRT television event in Sarajevo on 15 March, and was performed in Bosnian at Eurovision.
Whilst I got this on whatever-day it was, I’m not feeling the Bosnia Love this time round. Maya sings the song well, granted, but I’m getting the feeling that this is just actually a song “going through the motions” – it’s very difficult to find the words to explain what I am getting at – it’s just….. There, I guess. People in its locale will like it and, there are many of them in this bit, but not sure if that’s going to be enough.
She was due to perform seventeenth in the second semi-final in Baku on 24 May, with the grand final following on 26 May. The staging centred on Maya at a piano before she stood near the end of the song, against subdued lighting and architectural imagery on the LED screens. That sounds suitably serious, although the shoulder situation remained a personal emergency.
Qualifying? – I’d still like to say Yes, but am struggling to justify it. That was the pre-contest prediction, not a reaction to the result: retrospectively, Bosnia and Herzegovina did qualify, finishing sixth in the semi-final with 77 points. In the final it came eighteenth with 55 points, ranking fifteenth with juries and sixteenth with the public vote. My thoughts about possible regional support were speculation at the time, rather than an established explanation of the result.
