Latino Invasion; Oscar Moment: The class of 2004 could produce more nominations for Latin Americans than the previous 74 years combined.

Byline: Sean Smith

Foreigners are the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Some of the most celebrated directors of "American" films weren't born in the United States at all: Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, John Woo, Ang Lee... all born outside the United States. Of all the Oscars handed out for best directing since 1929, 27 percent have gone to men for whom English was (or is) a foreign language; 23 percent of best-picture winners were directed by a foreign-born auteur. Oddly, though, not one of those prizes has gone to a director from Mexico or South America. That's about to change.

Hollywood is in the midst of a Pan-American invasion, courtesy of five visionary talents who are poised to become to the next decade what Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola were to the 1970s. Yes, really. This group of Nuevo Wave directors has busted out of the art houses and into the mainstream. Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron not only wrote and directed the international indie hit "Y Tu Mama Tambien," but followed it up with the 2004 international smash "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." His countryman Guillermo del Toro turned a cult-favorite comic book, "Hellboy," into last spring's sleeper hit, and pal Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu followed his first film, the Oscar-nominated "Amores Perros," with the acclaimed "21 Grams" starring Sean Penn.

Farther south, Brazilian Fernando Meirelles earned a best-director nomination in 2003 for his startling "City of God," a movie that was produced by fellow Brazilian director Walter Salles, whose "Central Station" earned two Oscar noms in 1998, and whose new film, "The Motorcycle Diaries," may score best-picture and best-director nominations. Salles doesn't think all this is coincidental. "If you look at older movements like Italian neorealism or the French New Wave, they were made possible by directors who were close to each other and who not only made films but who thought about cinema," Salles says. "Alejandro, Alfonso, Fernando and myself, we are in constant contact. We're close friends. We send each other screenplays and show each other our works in progress, because in our early days we needed that to survive. You can't do this by yourself. When you come from a specific latitude, you break through collectively, or you don't."

But how, exactly, did they? Before Meirelles in 2003, the only South American ever nominated for best director was Argentine Hector Babenco for "Kiss of the Spider Woman"--almost 20 years before. Now, suddenly, this Pan-American quintet--plus Spain's Alejandro Amenabar, who wrote and directed "The Others," starring Nicole Kidman--are making fantastic films in Spanish and English, both inside and outside the studio system.

When the Oscar nomina-tions are announced in January, the list could include not only Salles, his film "Diaries" and his star Gael Garcia Bernal, but also Spanish legend Pedro Almodovar and his film "Bad Education," and Amenabar's poignant drama "The Sea Inside," starring previous nominee Javier Bardem. Toss in nominations for, say, art di-rection and cinematography for Cuaron's "Harry Potter" movie, and 2004 could generate more nominations for the Spanish-speaking world than the ...