Oh me, oh my. Trailers for trailers. I guess they’re here to stay.

Last week we gave you the heads up that the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s hotly anticipated biopic “Lincoln” will drop on Thursday as part of a bizarre Google+ hangout thing. And it’ll be screened in Times Square to boot. But to make sure everyone gets the picture, a preview of the preview has landed today, representing the first footage of the film to yet be revealed. The 44 seconds features what I imagine is a touch of John Williams’s original score and is carried through by dialogue from Union soldier to Daniel Day-Lewis’s 16th Commander-in-Chief.

The film will surely enter the season amid a lot of speculation and awards chatter. Much of that is thanks partly to numbskulls like me, who write things like, “[The project] is a marriage of artist and material that couldn’t be packed with more potential, a portrait of another very divided time and the one man who could collect the strands and strengthen the ties that bind a nation,” as I did in this season’s introductory Oscar column two weeks ago.

The thing is, I talk to a lot of people with films in play this season, and even those banking on their own projects can’t wait to see if this will indeed be “the one” this season. Of course, that’s partly deflection. No one wants the harsh scrutiny of the early spotlight and they’re more than willing to concede it to another film in September. But I sense genuine anticipation there.

We’ll all know in a couple months when the film finally hits theaters. And we’ll have at least an even better idea in three days when the trailer finally drops. In the meantime, here’s a taste.

Interesting side note to all of this: In case you didn’t know, Grantland writer Mark Harris is going the ethical route this year and has decided to bow out of Oscar coverage. The reason, of course, is the fact that his husband, Tony Kushner, wrote the screenplay for “Lincoln” and therefore it’s quite obviously a conflict of interest. I’ll miss Mark’s “Oscarmetrics” coverage this season, as his always a fresh take, but the gesture is surely a refreshing one.