Perhaps what's most vexing about the Hollywood establishment's recent embrace of Mexican and Latino filmmaking talent from abroad is that the industry continues to undervalue the creative efforts of native-born and second- and third-generation Mexican Americans and Latino Americans as well as the art they make and inspire.

Last year's modest but excellent "Quinceañera," written and directed by non-Latinos Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, was one of the most perceptive and authentic-feeling movies about the aspirations and struggles of Mexican American immigrants.

Such movies are still all too rare in Hollywood, and L.A. photographer, director and performance artist Harry Gamboa Jr. may have offered a partial explanation when he spoke last year on filmmaking at the Mexico City Book Fair.

Hollywood, like many Americans, Gamboa suggested, tends to be more accepting of Mexicans and Latinos if they're seen as temporary visitors rather than permanent residents. "The proximity of the Hollywood sign to East L.A. is mutually blinding," Gamboa says.

And Latino film artists still must battle ancient stereotypes. "The other day a reporter asked me if the rise of Oscar-nominated Mexicans would cause even more illegal immigration," says cinematographer Navarro.

Hollywood has seen this phenomenon of brilliant outsiders before. At the start of the sound era, dozens of well spoken, theatrically trained Brits migrated to the West Coast to show the Yanks how to do the classics (or imitate an Old Dixie accent in "Gone With the Wind"). The influence of these transatlantic interlopers continues to this day, as will be apparent at the Kodak Theatre tonight.

A few years later, artistic refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe practically reinvented Hollywood, fashioning entire new genres such as film noir by fusing American pulp-fiction conventions with Expressionist mise-en-scène.

And in the 1970s, a young generation of Italian American directors and tough-guy actors (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino) reimagined the nation's immigrant experience and transposed it onto shattering allegories of capitalist excess and urban alienation.

Something comparable seems to be happening with Latinos in Hollywood, who increasingly are feeling free to explore whatever subject compels them, yet without letting go of their own cultures. And the U.S. entertainment and marketing juggernaut is recognizing and responding to that expanded idea of what Latino identity is.

"The richness and depth of what it means to be a Latino in this country has always been there, it just hasn't been getting the attention it deserves," says Gonzalez, who long ago worked with Cuarón on a Miller beer TV commercial when the director was still an emerging talent. "What these three film makers are now forcing them to do is to grasp the concept that marketing to Hispanics in the U.S. is now multidimensional."

Put in less dollar-centric terms, Latinos are showing their ability to deliver what every successive wave of U.S. immigrants has brought with them from their homelands: the capacity to dream, and to dream big. No wonder the Hollywood Dream Machine is finally starting to pay attention.