More Honors was a blast

(Photo by Kostadinka Karova)

The More-Honors (MH) Academy award ceremony is probably AUBG's most attended event. Every video clip of this year's ceremony sent a strong message and made some people think, maybe for the first time, about their behavior. Students are probably not going to change because of this, but they will at least become aware of certain issues.

Previous years most of the winners were the "cool kids" who were getting their "fame" approved by winning the statue with the erected penis. For the first time MH was not a popularity contest. This year, the MH Academy did not offer categories such as Sports Person and Google of the Year because students wanted to win these. They added new ones, such as Cheapass and Dweeb, which better reflect the AUBG reality.

It is obvious that the 12th MH Ceremony tried to address problematic spheres of AUBG life. Through the clips they worked on during the last two semesters, MH mocked everything students were complaining about, but had no guts to do it publicly. There were some complaints that MH12 turned out to be a public humiliation which will leave an eternal stain on the reputation of the winners. This grumbling is ridiculous because it is not the MH academy who votes for the nominees, but their friends and acquaintances. In this case, the MH Academy was just a fun means of communication between the latter two.

One of the most memorable moments was the ecstatic applause the commercial for Arbenka provoked. The commercial was inspired by Arben Konedarev, the Skaptopara 1 hall director. The audience generally acknowledged the videos with strong applauses. The one I particularly remember was for Lazy of the Year, its point being "Not too lazy to take out the trash."

Although the overall quality of the videos last year was lower than this year, a couple of last year's clips were excellent, both in their idea and execution. However, it seemed like the rest of the videos were not very well thought through. Even though this year there were no clips that rose to the level of the last year's best ones, all the videos were of fairly similar quality and all of them sent a strong message to the public: Something is wrong at AUBG, and students should try to change it.

The ceremony itself was more entertaining than that of MH11. As one of my friends said, I did not look at my watch even once during the show. The person that added flair to the MH ceremony was Igor Letina, the host of the show. Letina was funny, well-spoken and managed to make up for the technical problems the Academy had. He was in control of everything happening on stage, except during the verbal diarrhea of waiter Valkata from the Niki's restaurant, who won the prize for Coolest non-student.

Although some of this year's most important events did not meet students' expectations, MH certainly did. However, MH should learn from their mistakes and not leave shooting and editing of the videos for the last moment, like they did this year. They should also technically prepare better for the show because if it weren't for the occasional problems with the sound and picture, they would have been perfect.

I believe MH moved the show to the next level, not only by brutal mockery of everyone on campus, but also by having the courage to finally mock themselves and address all the gossips about MH spending students' money on alcohol and marijuana. The12th MH Ceremony was certainly one of the most entertaining events I attended this year.