If you care to drag your ass out of bed at 5:30am PST tomorrow, then you can be among the first to hear of the sure-to-be-unremarkable Oscar nominations that are set to be announced from the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater tomorrow. I’m working on a rundown of the Awards season so far, which I’ll toss out there tomorrow or the day after as commentary on the nominations (spoiler alert: all signs point to The Artist taking home the big one).

To drum up buzz for the February 26th broadcast of the 84th Oscars (hosted by Boring Crystal), the Academy is running a digital advertising campaign that will absorb many of the digital billboards in Los Angeles, and act as a web campaign as well. It will consist of a series of images from Oscar-winning films across the years with an annoying-as-piss motif “We Showed You How To…” atop the photos of characters and moments from films like Forrest Gump, Bride of Frankenstein, and of course Avatar and The Dark Knight. More are set to debut across the month, and there’s also a YouTube component where you can submit thoughts via video the Oscars Channel. I’ve included the full press release below if you care to check that stuff out.

   

You can see them all on the Academy’s spruced up Oscar website, which has a new timeline features and twitter buzz tracking. This all amounts to a gussied-up version of the Oscar’s wiki page, but you could waste a few minutes there I suppose.

Again, the nominations hit tomorrow and I’ll definitely be updating you on those, and then you can expect some Oscar-season commentary as February progresses.

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Beverly Hills, CA – In anticipation of the 84th Academy Awards®, the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences has launched “Celebrate the Movies,” a digital exhibition spotlighting iconic moments from 84 films.

Beginning today, January 23, the exhibition will appear on digital billboards in Los Angeles, and on ABC’s digital “SuperSign,” an electronic landmark in New York’s Times Square. It will also be showcased on an online gallery on Oscar.com, and extend toyoutube.com/Oscars, where fans can share their most memorable movie-going experiences through video or text.

Images will debut in groups of 20 within the next two weeks. The 84 films represented span eight decades, beginning with “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) and culminating in “Avatar” (2009). Highlights from each decade include “Gone with the Wind” (1939), “Casablanca” (1942), “The Killers” (1946), “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), “True Grit” (1969), “The Exorcist” (1973), “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), “Driving Miss Daisy” (1989), “Apollo 13″ (1995), “Shrek” (2001), “Ray” (2004), and “The Dark Knight” (2008).  The exhibition highlights all of Hollywood’s major genres, as well as independent, animated, foreign-language, and documentary films.

Included in the first 20 images are the eight that were featured in the key art campaign, which was unveiled in late December.

The 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Tuesday, January 24, at 5:30 a.m. PST in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, February 26, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar® presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.

via Awards Daily