SHORT TAKES : An Oscar Role for Spielberg

Producer-director Steven Spielberg will participate in the 62nd annual Academy Awards presentation--but an Academy spokesman declined to elaborate, except to say that Spielberg will do more than present an award.

This will mark Spielberg’s fourth appearance on the show. In 1986, the director received the Academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, and he has presented the best director award on two previous occasions.

Spielberg has never won an Oscar himself, though his films, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,”(1977) “Raiders of the Lost Ark,”(1981) and “E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial,” (1982), all garnered nominations for best director.