As I stroll the busy exterior of the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, amid preparations for the 80^th Academy Award ceremony, Mexico is hot on my mind - and one Mexican in particular, long since dead. I watch men of Mexican descent unroll and staple down the red carpet under the supervision of tighty-whitey security whose work it is to idle about and talk importantly into communication devises clipped to their shoulders. Here we have a team of Latinos securing a tent pole in an Iwo Jiman feat of coordination.

Perhaps it is a fit of reverse-racism, but I just can't picture a bunch of white guys from LA effectively hoisting a tent pole like that. But such pondering is not why I dragged my arse over to Hollywood Boulevard this week. Nor was it to wipe my feet on the red carpet before all two of those Coen brothers do.

I came here specifically to view the ‘Meet the Oscars' display at the Renaissance hotel, above the Kodak Theater, and get the facts on the notorious badass who served as male-model for the design of the Oscar statuette: a Mexican actor-director-murderer named Emilio ‘El Indio' Fernandez, born in 1909, who once shot a critic in the testicles for poo-pooing one his movies.

Zing zang! In the testicles!

Perhaps it is not so curious then that a crotch-killing actor-murder is totally erased from by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences historical record. Here, the ample chest of the original, El Indio-based Oscar design.

After all, we come from a country whose primary founding father earned his mythical spurs by allegedly chopping down a silly cherry tree only to redeem himself by confession. Whooptie doo. Now where would we be in our mythical maturity if Mr. George Washington did something less ho-hum like bury the milkmaid after boinking her out by the family barn, THEN finding the cahonas to confess? I'll tell you where! We'd be honoring Mr. Emilio El Indio Fernandez for a long and prolific career in the film arts, and as poser for the Oscar statuette, despite his colorful sideline as a shooter of testicles and murderer in self-defense. Here, Oscar's ass.

I ask the young tour guide at the ‘Meet the Oscar' exhibit about the missing Mr. Fernandez. He is cheery and confident but for the need of a swipe with an astringent pad across his cheeks. He gives me the party line: "The Academy does not recognize the man you mentioned to be the inspiration for the Oscar statuette." He can't even say the guy's name!

So just who does The Academy recognize to be the bodily inspiration for the Oscar statuette? Which, by the way, is so featureless as to appear a tragic burn victim? 

Here's what they'll let you know: The historically-recognized designer of the statuette is MGM's art director Cedric Gibbons. But omitted is that it was his then-wife, the deliciously appealing starlet Delores Del Rio, who brought to him Emilio El Indio Fernandez - as perfect model given his ample-shoulders and deep-chested physique. Here's a still from Birds of Paradise, 1930s, showing Ms. Del Rio topless but for a lei super-glued to her boobies, back before flesh-colored body suits.

Says The Academy, it was no real man that inspired the design, but your work-a-day sleek-thighed knight, a take-your-pick seeker of Holy Grails, with requisite sword.

So what is it? Conspiratorial cover-up or just - creative laziness? On the one hand, we can accuse The Academy of whitewashing. Or prissiness. Yes it is an institution, and institutions rarely wish for assassinators of testicles to screw up their G-rated histories, in this case manifest in a neutered Oscar statuette.

If it's just creative laziness, then shame on the Academy! My dead gerbil from 3^rd grade could have come up with a better tale than a generic knight as the inspiration for the statuette. After all, these are people whose members are paid richly to sit around and make things up.

Perhaps the Academy takes us for a nation of gullible fools. A lot of us paid ten bucks to see The Spartans  so I won't come down on either side of that, but, we all know that the conveniently-placed sword held by the Oscar-knight is integrated into the statuette's design for one sole reason: to cover the Oscar's willy, pressed vertically against the groin, to thus eradicate any awkward clutching of the statuette's scrotal anatomy when accepted in front of a bazillion TV viewers by a winning star or starlet.

And so El Indio! I am here to give your badass honor its due, to pick up where The Academy left you, which is, like the floors of the country that brought you Spic ‘n Span, scrubbed clean. Here, El Indio and a young boy in one of his gagillion films.

Emilio El Indio Fernandez was a failed rebel sentenced to 20 years in jail who escaped exile to scrap together a career as a bit-part actor starting in LA, only to return to Mexico to concoct a prolific career in film. Born of Indian and who-knows-what-else parentage, hence ‘El Indio', he would lead the way for the Mexican golden age of filmmaking, from the late 30s to 40s, as a writer/director of 40 films with screenwriting credits on as many. While some of his deliciously silly titles include The Super Madman, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Lola the Truck Driving Woman, he appeared in Peckinpaugh's sun-baked lot of anti-heroes The Wild Bunch as scummy warlord Generalissimo Mapache super fond of booze, babes, and machine guns. Two of Fernandez' films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and his adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Pearl won a nomination for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1947. The film also won the Golden Ariel for Best Picture at the 1948 Ariel Awards, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars, which I had no idea even existed. Did you? Dumb American!

And so, when watching the Oscars lugged around by Academy winners, raise a drink of straight alcohol to the unsung Oscar-bot El Indio, residing in testicle-shooter's hell, added to Dante's Inferno specifically for his ilk, and shout Viva la bad ass. Maybe, if he's not busy shooting a few holes in the devil, he'll hear you. 

 ROBYN EWING is LA2DAY'S reporter of Aesthetics-at-Large

rae@la2day.com