The third annual esctoday.com awards are currently being held. While you can still cast your votes until 23rd December, we will take a closer look on the nominees and the categories every day in random order. Part three is dedicated to the Best duo/group national final performance not to qualify for Eurovision category.

History

This award will be given out for the third time. In 2006, it wwent to the group BWO from Sweden with the Song Temple of love, which finished second at the Melodifestival final. Last year, Monrose from Germany, whose placing in the field of only three contestants was never revealed, took home the prize. The complete results were as follows:

2006

1. BWO with Temple of love (Sweden) – 45%
2. Flamingosi with Ludi letnij ples (Serbia & Montenegro) – 18%
3. Akcent feat. Nico with Jokerò (Romania) – 17%
4. Gameboys with Kama ahava (Israel) – 10%
   Jet Set with How many people? (Poland) – 10%

2007

1. Monrose with Even heaven cries (Germany) – 40%
2. Crash! with Wannabe (Norway) – 23%
3. Medi-T with On and on (France) – 20%
4. Hele Kõre & Kristjan Kasearu with Romeo ja Julia (Estonia) – 11%
5. Gunars Kalninš & Jolanda Suvorova with What a love can do to me (Latvia) – 6%

2008 awards

The following acts are nominated this year:

1. Biondo of Romania for Shine
2. Beauty Queens of Serbia for Zavet
3. La Casa Azúl of Spain for La revolución sexual
4. BWO of Sweden for Lay your love on me
5. Nordman of Sweden for I lågornas sken

Click here to watch the videos of the nominees!

Swedish band Biondo won the second semi final of the Romanian national selection and finished second in the final, seven points behind Nico & Vlad, with their operatic entry Shine. Later, they took part at the popular Golden Stag Festival in Romania and finished again second in a field with many other contestants from the Romanian national finals.

The Beauty Queens tried to represent Serbia in 2008 having already backed Marija Šerifovic during her winning performance in Helsinki. Their entry Zavet waswritten by the same composer as Molitva: Vladimir Graic.The group were the clearly winners of the Beovizija semi final but dropped to third place in the final, when they had to perform at the unlucky #2 spot.

Retro band La Casa Azúl entered the Spanish national final Salvemos Eurovision in 2008 as their song La revolución sexualwas one of the ten songs that qualified from the 530 ones submitted through MySpace. Eventually, they finished in third place with 42 points behind Rodolfo Chikilicuatre (60 points) and Coral (48 points). The song was also a radio hit in Latin America.

BWO from Sweden have already won this award in 2006 and are nominated again this year. With Lay your love on me, they were the clear winners of the third Melodifestival semi final getting more than twice as many votes as Frida feat. Headline. In the final, they were the last act on stage and eventually finished third with 158 points behind Charlotte Perelli (224 points) and Sanna Nielsen (206 points).

The second Swedish act nominated is the group Nordman that finished fourth in the fourth semi final and therefore had to enter the second chance round. In the first voting of andra chansen, they achieved they highest televoting result of all semi finals and ruled out Johnson & Häggkvist. In the second round, they could win against Suzzie Tapper and went forward to the final, where they finishedsixth with their songI lågornas sken.

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