UPDATE: Many readers are coming to this older article via search. You can find the updated post for this year’s ceremony here.

Just as they do every year, the Academy trotted out its Oscar nominees at the crack of dawn this morning, but this year had a twist. All of the announcements were streamed live on the web at Oscar.com. But like so many traditional media titans’ web initiatives, Oscar’s first attempt was less than golden.

Surprise, surprise, there is no embedding and no built-in link sharing. It would have been pretty cool to post the official announcement on your blog — but the Academy is probably over-protective of its brand. The clip is also one big 15-minute file, the first six minutes of which are an intro filled with dumb Oscar trivia hosted by what looks like two Academy interns.

Elsewhere, the “video” section of Oscar.com is a mish-mash of film trailers. The films are all nominees, but they aren’t listed by category, so you don’t know which was nominated for what, and each one uses the same Oscar thumbnail. This is just lazy and inexcusable.

It’s good that Oscar is finally venturing into the Web video world, but its current efforts won’t win it any awards.