With public and political pressure mounting to get homeless people off the streets of California, a task force appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom is recommending that local governments face tough new legal sanctions for failing to make progress.

In a report released Monday, the Council of Regional Homeless Advisors is calling for an amendment to the California Constitution that would create a legally enforceable mandate to reduce the homeless population. The Legislature would have to craft the plan, which would then appear as a statewide ballot measure in November.

If approved by voters, the mandate would allow the state to sue cities and counties — or even itself — if the number of people living outdoors in encampments and vehicles doesn’t decline.

The 13-member task force, led by Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, argues that the state needs to carry a big stick to convince local governments that they will face consequences if they don’t get people off the streets — including the possible loss of local control.

“We’ve tried moral persuasion. We’ve tried economic incentives,” Steinberg said. “But all of it’s optional. Why should this be optional? It shouldn’t be. It mustn’t be. Thousands of people are dying on the streets, and people are telling us this is a priority.”

The far-reaching proposal is certain to stir controversy — both at the Capitol in Sacramento and with local governments across the state. But Steinberg says the mandate is necessary because there are overlapping and convoluted systems of care that sometimes have differing goals and approaches.

Money and responsibility for homelessness programs are split between elected officials in cities and counties and the administrators of “continuums of care” — the local and regional agencies created to handle funding and organize the distribution of services for homeless people.

But cooperation and coordination don’t often happen, and some local governments aren’t as aggressive at addressing homelessness as state officials would like.

“There is too much fragmentation,” Steinberg said.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, another member of the task force, said the proposed mandate represented a way to build trust with residents that the government was addressing what the report described as a “mounting catastrophe.”

A recent report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that homelessness increased in California by more than 16% from 2018 to 2019, leaving more than 151,000 Californians without permanent housing. Nearly 71% — about 108,000 people — are living outdoors in encampments or in vehicles, the highest percentage of any state in the nation.

Oakland has been hit especially hard. Homelessness climbed 47% from 2017 to 2019 in the Bay Area city, according to last year’s point-in-time headcount. As mayor, Schaaf said she would welcome a mandate because it would ensure that surrounding communities weren’t adding to her city’s problems.

“I need other cities to be doing their part because Oakland does not exist on an island,” Schaaf said. “I believe Oakland would pass that accountability test.”

Newsom, speaking Monday in Grass Valley where he was touring homeless facilities, said he broadly supported “the direction they’re going,” but would like to see a pilot program to test the mandate idea. He said he expects a “robust debate” both with and among legislators about the potential ballot measure.

A pilot program could be launched while that debate is under way, Newsom said.

“I think we’ve got to socialize something that is a tectonic shift in the way we’ve done things and what I’ve learned — and you’ve probably heard me say this — is the old wonderful African proverb that if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together,” he said. “We’ll see how far they want to go. … I’m not giving up on 2020.”

Last week, Newsom unveiled his own expansive plan for addressing homelessness, including more than $1.4 billion to address the lack of shelters as well as healthcare for homeless people. More than half of that money is expected to go directly to local services.

Steinberg, Schaff and Ridley-Thomas each said they would support their cities and counties participating in a pilot program. Ridley-Thomas said he planned on presenting such a resolution to the rest of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. If passed, he said it would require the county to come up with recommendations within 60 days to implement a pilot program.

However, neither Ridley-Thomas nor Steinberg had details on how a local government could fulfill a pilot project on par with the proposed mandate. Steinberg suggested local governments could pass their own ordinances to hold their cities and counties legally accountable to reducing homelessness.

“There is a lot we will have to figure out here,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Graham Knaus, executive director of the California State Assn. of Counties, cautioned that the task force’s plan lacks detail, including the money that would required to ensure that local governments have enough funding to accomplish the goals.

The “recommendations raise a number of key policy issues that are worth exploring, but that certainly require additional detail and conversation to work out how they would be funded,” Knaus said.

The task force report comes as the state prepares to give local governments unprecedented levels of funding to address homelessness. In addition to the money that Newsom proposed in his budget, $640 million in one-time spending approved last year will begin to hit cities and counties in the coming weeks.

The mandate idea marks a step away from — or at least around — the controversy Steinberg sparked with his “right to shelter” idea last year.

That plan would have required a bed to be provided to every homeless person in the state and for homeless people to accept the help. Advocates fear the latter requirement will lead to more law enforcement sweeps of encampments and infringe on people’s civil rights.

Others panned the idea because they believed it would lead to a proliferation of large shelters that would get people off the streets but not necessarily into permanent housing.

Ridley-Thomas called the blowback a “knee-jerk” reaction. The “right to shelter” plan had always been a starting point.

“Why would we want to warehouse people?” he said. “That was what was really in advocates’ craw. They were not appreciating that we don’t have to warehouse people.”

Schaaf said she opposed the “right to shelter” plan because it focused on the short-term goal of getting people indoors and lacked the flexibility of a mandate in allocating resources, such as for rental assistance programs and affordable housing.

Having a mandate, she said, “really starts with accountability, and I think that is really a more successful place to start.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and an advisor to the state task force, said the mandate, if approved, would accomplish the same thing as the “right to shelter” plan but without a requirement that homeless people accept services.

“This is about the duty of the government to ensure that shelter is available for everyone,” he said. “We can do something without infringing civil liberties. Providing housing and forcing people to use it are two different steps.”

The task force’s recommendation likely will be discussed by the Legislature in the coming weeks, but it is far from certain that it will be adopted and put on the ballot for voters to consider.

Steinberg said the Legislature would have to come up with the final details of how the mandate would be implemented. But the task force, according to its report, has envisioned letting local governments take up to a year to come up with their own benchmarks and then be held to those goals in subsequent years.

If cities or counties miss their benchmarks, the state would have the ability to ask a court to intervene, possibly redirecting money and resources. The mandate, however, would not require that the state monitor or take legal action. Individuals would not have the right to sue.

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Although the mandate would give the state legal authority to crack down, the task force also said the state needed to take the lead on creating a unified crisis response. “We lack clarity regarding which levels of government are or should be responsible for funding and implementing various aspects of a response to the crisis of homelessness,” the task force said.

Ridley-Thomas compared what the task force had proposed to the resources that state and local governments devoted to making sure people were able to vote.

“We spend a lot of money making sure people are protected in terms of their rights — multilingual ballots, technology, the whole nine yards,” he said. “It is that kind of apparatus that needs to be put in place to protect people from being homeless.”

Steinberg compared the proposed mandate to other sweeping public policy initiatives, such as the state law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or the federal requirement to provide free and appropriate education to children with special needs.

“This kind of public policy coupled with the resources gives the resources a much better chance to actually bend the curve,” he said.

Many of the other recommendations in the task force’s report include items that Newsom laid out in his budget last week, including a greater emphasis on preventing homelessness by assisting those on the brink of it, and a focus on mental health and substance abuse services.

Both the governor and the task force also said that Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act, which placed a tax on millionaires, should be reexamined to streamline how those dollars could be spent.

A sweeping proposal by the Trump administration to help Los Angeles’ growing homeless population may come with strings attached, raising questions about whether a deal can be worked out between the city and the White House.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson told Mayor Eric Garcetti in a letter last Thursday that Trump officials are prepared to offer Los Angeles an array of resources, including emergency healthcare services and federal land. The Times obtained the letter through a public records request.

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The offer follows recent talks between senior Trump administration officials, Garcetti and Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger that have raised advocates’ hopes that federal aid is on its way.

However, Carson also suggested in his letter that the government expects changes from L.A. in how it manages homelessness. “To address this humanitarian crisis in the long term,” he wrote, “the city and county of Los Angeles must partner with our efforts and make necessary policy changes.”

Those changes include “empowering and utilizing local law enforcement” and “reducing housing regulations to expedite affordable housing construction,” Carson wrote.

Carson’s letter is somewhat vague, making it hard to know how significant the aid would be and whether any of the Trump administration’s conditions would be deal-breakers.

Though it’s true that federal funds earmarked for Los Angeles often come with stipulations, some fear that demands to alter policing policies to clear more encampments, for instance, could run afoul of several legal settlements and federal court rulings. It also could anger local leaders.

If L.A. loosens rules around the construction of affordable housing, neighborhood groups or unions also are likely to push back.

It’s far from clear what specific policies the federal government wants the city and county to change, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment Monday. “The talks are going well and are continuing,” a spokesperson said, speaking broadly about the relationship.

Barger spokesman Tony Bell said that his office doesn’t know what county policies the federal government wants altered. “We’ve had discussions and talked about potential areas that need work, but not specific concrete measures,” he said.

Garcetti’s office declined to answer specific questions about Carson’s letter. “The mayor looks forward to continuing the discussions with federal officials in the coming weeks,” said his spokesman, Alex Comisar.

For months, Carson and others in the Trump administration have promised federal action, including threats of a crackdown on L.A. and San Francisco. In September, federal officials visited Los Angeles to study the homelessness crisis, in which nearly 59,000 people are living in street encampments, vehicles and shelters.

Justice Department officials met with the heads of the unions that represent rank-and-file Los Angeles police officers and county sheriff’s deputies to discuss options to deal with court rulings and legal settlements that have limited the LAPD’s ability to carry out sweeps at encampments.

In a recent Fox News interview, Carson suggested that harsh measures might be needed, saying officials needed to “uncuff law enforcement so that people can be removed now and placed in transitional places.”

In his letter last week to Garcetti, Carson wrote that the federal government is prepared to offer emergency healthcare services, supplemental emergency shelters and transitional housing, federal land, assistance for law enforcement and “voucher utilization support.”

Carson wrote that the “city and county must partner with our efforts” and focus on “reallocating funding and [prioritizing] shelter construction on federal and local land” and “expanding local mental health resources.” He also said the county and city must provide shelters focused on “self-sufficiency programming.”

Diane Yentel, president and chief executiveof the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said such programming typically means that shelters require homeless people to accept services, including drug rehabilitation, as a condition for getting an emergency bed. Such requirements could run counter to the widely accepted “housing first” model of addressing homelessness, which focuses on getting people indoors before addressing other issues, such as addiction or mental health.

Yentel also questioned whether the federal aid would include new housing vouchers, rather than focus on using existing vouchers. “It sounds to me like there’s no money or assistance to help with housing extremely low-income people, which is the core of the [homelessness] problem,” she said.

In an interview last week, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas praised Barger and Garcetti for trying to work with the Trump administration, but called it “high-risk” because of actions that the government has recently taken, such as seeking to change fair housing standards.

“I just have a hard time understanding, based on history and current practice, how you get something done with the Trump administration,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, during his budget presentation last week, said the state isn’t waiting for a response on requests for help that have been sent to Trump.

“He’s tweeting. We’re doing something,” the governor said. “We have a real plan, real strategies. We’re building on what works. We don’t need him to identify this problem.”

Times Sacramento Bureau Chief John Myers contributed to this report.

Aviation crews with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department made two rescues last week in the Mt. Baldy area for hikers unprepared for the elements.

At 2:30 p.m. Friday, two L.A. residents in their late 20s were hiking the Devil’s Backbone trail, east of the Mt. Baldy summit, in extremely icy conditions, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Neither was wearing crampons — metal spikes that hikers can attach to their footwear for added traction.

One of the men slipped and slid about 200 feet down an ice chute before hitting a tree. His hiking partner called for help, and Air Rescue 306 soon arrived.

Crew Chief Deputy David Negron hoisted Fire Capt. Jay Hausman about 65 feet down to the injured hiker, and he placed the man in a rescue harness. They took the man to a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries.

The second hiker then realized he was in the same danger of slipping on the ice. He called again for help. The crew returned and conducted another hoist rescue, taking the second man to a nearby sheriff’s station.

“The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department would like to remind the public about the dangers of hiking in hazardous conditions such as steep, rugged, mountainous terrain covered with snow and ice,” Sgt. Daniel Futscher said in a news release. “Without crampons (a specific type of traction device for ice climbing) and an ice ax, along with the proper training to use this equipment, this type of activity can lead to serious injury or death.”

A few hours later, a crew headed to the Ice House Canyon area of Mt. Baldy to search for a lost 26-year-old Santa Ana man.

Using night vision goggles, the crew found the man a few miles from the trailhead at 8,000 feet elevation in steep, mountainous terrain covered in snow and ice.

As the sun set, the temperature had plummeted to near freezing, and the man had traveled two hours in the snow at night before stopping because of pain in his feet. He was taken to a hospital for hypothermia.

Deputy Doug Brimmer, a pilot on the rescue crew, said the man told rescuers that he had hiked the trail before but, like others that they’ve rescued, didn’t seem to have considered how winter weather would intensify the difficulty of the trek.

“When we get the snow, they love to come up and get the beautiful views, but they don’t come prepared,” Brimmer said. “This guy was hiking by himself in light clothing and tennis shoes with no food, no water and 50% battery life on his cellphone.”

The rescues come about a month after Sreenivas “Sree” Mokkapati, a 52-year-old Irvine resident, went missing after he got separated from his group that was attempting to hike to the Mt. Baldy summit.

A few days into the search, authorities closed the Mt. Baldy trails because rescue crews kept getting diverted to help other hikers in distress.

The search for Mokkapati was shut down after Timothy Staples, a 32-year-old search and rescue volunteer, was found dead in the ice and snow after he got separated from his search partner. Mokkapati remains missing.

County authorities have continued to stress that no one should attempt to climb Mt. Baldy in the winter months without proper equipment, including crampons, snowshoes, trekking poles and ice axes.

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As a friend wisely reminded me earlier this awards season: Never assume that just because someone or something didn’t win an award, earn a nomination or land on a year-end list, the person or organization didn’t see the work in question. Having been on the receiving end of such assumptions myself — why yes, indignant Twitter user, I did in fact see “Jojo Rabbit” (twice!) — I know the folly of questioning other people’s expertise, let alone expecting them to share or reflect my own unimpeachable taste.

And yet early on Oscar nominations morning, my judgment clearly impaired by a mix of reflexive anger and insufficient caffeine, I couldn’t help but ask the forbidden questions: Did enough members of the motion picture academy actually see “Us”? Or “Hustlers”? Or “The Farewell”? Or “Uncut Gems”?

The lack of recognition for four of the smartest American movies released last year — all of them well reviewed by critics and well attended by audiences — may not answer that question definitively, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. At the very least, some of us were hoping for acting nominations for Lupita Nyong’o’s staggering dual turn in “Us,” or Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen’s touching granddaughter-grandmother act in “The Farewell,” or Adam Sandler’s thrilling psychological implosion in “Uncut Gems.” As for Jennifer Lopez in “Hustlers,” most of us assumed she was not just a shoo-in but, in a sane world, a legitimate threat to win.

2020 Oscars race

But as this year’s overall roster attests, it can be hard if not impossible for a politically charged horror movie with black actors — or an independent drama whose pedigree doesn’t scream capital-“P” prestige — to be taken seriously. That’s especially true in a field dominated by noisy zeitgeist favorites like “Joker,” a movie I admired more than most of my colleagues, and auteur-driven magnum opuses like “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” neither of which I begrudge their outsized acclaim. But standout individual achievements in underhyped titles require a level of patience and discernment generally lost on the academy, which mostly likes to nominate movies the way you or I might buy toilet paper: in bulk.

Including Nyong’o, Awkwafina, Zhao and/or Lopez — or, for that matter, Alfre Woodard and Aldis Hodge in “Clemency” or Eddie Murphy and Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Wesley Snipes in “Dolemite Is My Name” — would have certainly improved a slate of acting nominees that, Cynthia Erivo’s lead actress nomination for “Harriet” aside, is rightly being taken to task for its dearth of diversity. And if you consider diversity to be the cause of the politically correct scold, I can only respond that it is, in fact, the perfectly natural outcome of any broad, intelligent survey of the year’s most notable achievements in filmmaking. Any organization that didn’t short-list at least three or four (or eight or nine) actors of color this year is either not watching enough movies or watching them with an awfully selective filter.

Which is not to suggest that there were no happy or heartening surprises. While disappointment with the academy has become an annual headache, I have always found consolation in those occasional Oscar-morning silver linings, those nominations that, for whatever reason, couldn’t help but bring a smile to my face. Finding them took a bit more strain this year, but if anything that makes them all the more worth celebrating.

1. “Parasite” earned six nominations, including picture and director

It was hardly a shock to see the academy follow critics, audiences and industry guilds in showering love on Bong Joon Ho’s darkly comic domestic thriller, but that doesn’t make it any less gratifying. It just goes to show that breathless hype, placed in service of a genuinely great movie, really can move a hidebound organization in the direction of progress. The academy’s ongoing efforts to diversify its voting body, especially in terms of members overseas, surely help.

That South Korea finally scored its first nomination in the international feature category (formerly foreign-language film) would already be cause for celebration; that “Parasite” also cracked the picture, director, original screenplay, editing and production design categories is nothing short of marvelous. It would have been even more marvelous had it also earned nominations for supporting actor (Song Kang Ho), supporting actress (Cho Yeo Jeong) and cinematography (Hong Kyung Pyo), but you can’t have everything.

2. “Honeyland” made Oscar history

Believe the buzz (sorry): No movie until now has ever managed to score nominations for both documentary feature and international feature, and it would be hard to think of a worthier exception than Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s luminous portrait of a Macedonian beekeeper struggling to preserve her traditional way of life. As the winner of three prizes in the 2019 Sundance Film Festival’s world cinema competition, it’s one of the few Sundance titles to score Oscar attention this year. Also nice to see a documentary that doesn’t overdo the drone shots (sorry again).

3. And speaking of documentaries …

That the stirring “Apollo 11” didn’t score a nomination for documentary feature was a sad surprise, one that oddly echoed last year’s omission of the similarly nostalgic, warm-spirited “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” The nonfiction branch is clearly in a more pessimistic mood these days: Taken together, its final five nominees — “American Factory,” “The Cave,” “The Edge of Democracy,” “For Sama,” “Honeyland” — add up to a stunning global panorama of social, political and environmental unrest. It’s hard to imagine a grimmer slate of nominees, or a better one.

4. Antonio Banderas, an actor nominee for “Pain and Glory”

This year’s lead actor race was so ridiculously competitive, you could have filled out an excellent list of nominees with the presumed also-rans alone (Sandler, Murphy, Robert De Niro for “The Irishman,” Taron Egerton for “Rocketman” and Christian Bale for “Ford v Ferrari,” to name a few). In a field this crowded, a first-ever nomination for Banderas was far from assured, even after he handily won best actor from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. and the National Society of Film Critics. It’s a pleasure too, to see the academy recognize a Spanish-language performance directed by the great Pedro Almodóvar, whose “Pain and Glory” also landed a nomination for international feature.

5. Florence Pugh, a supporting actress nominee for “Little Women”

The 24-year-old English actress had a remarkable breakthrough year with not only “Little Women” but also “Midsommar” and “Fighting With My Family.” She was excellent in all three — her physically and emotionally robust work in “Fighting With My Family” might be the best of the lot — but since WWE fisticuffs and Scandinavian death cults are clearly not the academy’s cup of hallucinogen-spiked tea, I’m more than pleased to see Pugh acknowledged for giving us, among many other things, an Amy March for the ages.

6. Tom Hanks, a supporting actor nominee for “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”

It was around the time he was overlooked for his revelatory work in 2013’s “Captain Phillips” that I realized that Hanks was actually in danger of being underrated. His nomination may have everything to do with the synergy of a beloved American actor playing a beloved American icon (Fred Rogers), but it’s a relief to see his 19-year Oscar drought come to an end, and for a movie that, as directed with sly intelligence by Marielle Heller, deserved recognition beyond its biggest marquee name.

7. Rian Johnson, an original screenplay nominee for “Knives Out”

The year’s most ingeniously plotted movie was also the first Hollywood release in years to pay homage to Agatha Christie while actually understanding the honest-to-God pleasures of Agatha Christie. And it was a trenchant rebuke of racism and classism to boot; more cinematic bonbons should be laced with this much sociopolitical acid.

8. “The Lighthouse” scored a cinematography nomination

As past mentions in this category for “Roma,” “Cold War,” “Ida” and “The White Ribbon” have reminded us, the cinematography branch loves to recognize black-and-white imagery when it can. Of course it recognized Jarin Blaschke’s stunning 35-millimeter photography in Robert Eggers’ cabin-fever horror picture, which brilliantly deployed antiquarian camera lenses and a square aspect ratio to salute a bygone era of Hollywood filmmaking. A nomination for Willem Dafoe from the actors branch would have been no less welcome.

9. “A Hidden Life” is still in theaters

No, Terrence Malick’s stunningly beautiful, politically and spiritually galvanizing drama didn’t get a single nomination. But in a year when the academy saw fit to nominate the wrong Fox Searchlight release about rejecting Nazism (“Jojo Rabbit”) — as well as a toothless crowd-pleaser about Catholicism at an ideological impasse (“The Two Popes”) — I am choosing to view the mere existence of “A Hidden Life” as its own hard-won triumph. Did the academy see it? Maybe not — but that’s no reason for you to follow suit.

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After months of uncertainty, this year’s wide-open awards season appeared to come into focus Monday morning with the nominations for the 92nd Academy Awards, with the dark comic-book smash “Joker” leading the field with 11 nominations followed closely by the World War I drama “1917,” Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic “The Irishman” and Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s fantasia “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” with 10 nods apiece.

But if you look closer, the academy’s choices brought as many questions as they did answers, revealing an organization — and an industry — caught between competing crosscurrents when it comes to thorny issues of inclusion and the future of moviegoing itself.

At a time when old formulas are being upended and Hollywood is reevaluating where to place its biggest bets, the best picture nominees span a wide range of genres and scales. The nine movies in contention range from outside-the-box films like the Nazi satire “Jojo Rabbit,” the violent, hot-button “Joker” and Bong Joon Ho’s genre-scrambling thriller “Parasite” — the first South Korean film ever to earn a shot at the academy’s top prize — to more traditional studio Oscar fare like Sam Mendes’ “1917″ and the car-racing drama “Ford v Ferrari,” to intimate stories like the literary adaptation “Little Women” and the divorce drama “Marriage Story.”

Powered by “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story” and the drama “The Two Popes,” which earned acting nominations for stars Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins as well as its screenplay, Netflix made a strong showing with 24 nominations in total, easily outpacing the competition. The most disruptive force to hit Hollywood since the advent of television, the streaming giant has made steady gains recently in its pursuit of Oscar glory; last year it earned 15 nominations, and in 2018 it earned eight.

Resistance to streaming is still stubborn in some quarters of the film business, however, and it’s unclear whether Netflix will be able to go the distance and take home the best picture trophy it has long coveted. At this year’s Golden Globes, the company led the film categories with 17 nominations but in the end only managed a single win.

2020 Oscars race

Even as A-list directors like Scorsese have been brought into the streaming fold, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, a double nominee for producing “The Irishman” and “Joker,” says the jury is still out on whether the industry at large has finally accepted the arrival of Netflix. “I think that’s yet to be seen,” she said. “I think that it’s certainly getting there and I’m so happy for them. They are extraordinary partners. I hope that everybody continues to embrace Netflix and the art that they’re making.”

The directing category featured familiar faces — including Scorsese, who has eight previous nominations and one win, Tarantino, who earned his third nod in the category, and Mendes, who won for his 1999 debut feature “American Beauty” — as well as first-time nominees Bong and Todd Phillips (“Joker”).

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But even as many in Hollywood have been working to bring more gender equality behind the camera — in 2019, for the first time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited more women to join the directing branch than men — no female directors made this year’s cut, with potential contenders Greta Gerwig (“Little Women”), Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) among those left out.

Reactions on social media decried the all-male directing nominees, but the academy noted that, when tallied across all categories, a record 62 women were nominated this year. In the feature documentary category, four of the five nominated films were either directed or co-directed by women.

In the fiercely competitive lead actor category, Antonio Banderas (“Pain and Glory”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Once Upon a Time”), Adam Driver (“Marriage Story”), Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”) and Jonathan Pryce (“The Two Popes”) all scored nominations, while nominees for lead actress are Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”), Scarlett Johansson (“Marriage Story”), Saoirse Ronan (“Little Women”), Charlize Theron (“Bombshell”) and Renée Zellweger (“Judy”).

For DiCaprio, who won the lead actor Oscar in 2016 for “The Revenant,” there was a certain delicious irony in earning his sixth acting nomination for playing Rick Dalton, a onetime TV star clinging to the last shreds of his relevance in a changing Hollywood, in “Once Upon a Time.”

“I think Rick Dalton would be ecstatic,” DiCaprio said of his nomination. “Rick was becoming obsolete and embodied that major cultural transition in the industry. This film, in a lot of ways, was Quentin’s love letter to Los Angeles and this entire industry — so many of the actors before me that built the foundation of this entire town.”

On the inclusion front, despite its aggressive push to diversify its historically white-male-dominated membership, the academy just barely avoided a reprise of the #OscarsSoWhite firestorm that had dogged it in recent years.

With supporting actress contender and “Hustlers” star Jennifer Lopez left off the list, along with such other contenders as Awkafina (“The Farewell”), Eddie Murphy (“Dolemite Is My Name”), Lupita Nyong’o (“Us”) and Jamie Foxx (“Just Mercy”), Erivo was the only person of color among this year’s acting nominees.

To director Rian Johnson, who received his first-ever Oscar nomination for his original screenplay for the sleeper hit whodunit “Knives Out,” this year’s relatively homogenous slate of nominees demonstrate that the industry still has work to do to showcase more diverse voices.

“I think just kind of letting the tide take its course is not good enough,” Johnson said. “For example, there being no female directors nominated is — I hope it’s just going to stoke the conversation and hopefully spur some activity. We’ve got to figure something out.”

At the same time, as its membership has expanded rapidly in recent years, the academy has become a far more international organization; last year’s class of invitees represented 59 countries and swelled the group’s ranks to nearly 9,800. That influx of new foreign members may have helped boost “Parasite” to its six nominations, following in the path of last year’s Spanish-language drama “Roma,” which earned 10 nominations including best picture.

“Usually foreign-language films tend to be trapped in this framework of art-house films from distant countries,” said Bong. “So it’s been such a great joy to see the entire team being acknowledged for their great work in various ways.”

The 11 nominations for “Joker” capped a wild awards-season roller-coaster ride for the film, which earned rapturous reviews following its premiere in August at the Venice Film Festival only to be greeted with sharply divided reactions and a tide of pre-release controversy in the U.S. as many feared it would incite violence. In the end, its $1 billion-plus global box office haul, a record for an R-rated film, showed that gambling on a different and edgier kind of franchise film could pay off handsomely for Warner Bros.

That said, with the major studios and Netflix sucking up so much of the industry’s oxygen, a number of other smaller films that took big creative swings failed to break through with Oscar voters. Despite a slate of acclaimed releases like “Uncut Gems,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Waves” and “The Farewell,” the indie distributor A24, which released best picture winner “Moonlight” in 2016, pulled in just a single nomination this year, a cinematography nod for “The Lighthouse.”

The acting categories included a number of industry vets who’ve been around the Oscar block several times before, though for some of them their last nomination was quite a while back. The supporting actor category, for example, brought Tom Hanks his first nod in 19 years for “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” while Al Pacino (“The Irishman”), Anthony Hopkins (“The Two Popes”) and Joe Pesci (“The Irishman”) earned their first nods in 27, 22 and 29 years, respectively.

With the Oscars set for Feb. 9, the earliest date ever, the next month will be a blur of screenings, interviews, red carpets and cocktail parties. But for those who received the early-morning call that they had received their first Oscar nomination, this dizzying moment will take some time to fully process.

“This is the first time that we’re going through this and all the Korean team members were all very happy but at the same time perplexed,” said Bong, who was celebrating the news with ice cream. “It feels like if I take the wrong step I’ll wake up from my dream.”

Times staff writers Amy Kaufman, Mark Olsen and Jen Yamato contributed to this report.

See the full list of 2020 Oscar nominees.

What is the point of Netflix if the year that it receives more Oscar nominations than any other studio is the year that we return to the status quo of no female directing nominees and exactly one person of color nominated in the acting categories?

Seriously, is this the brave new world of streaming? Where press releases go out daily about the wildly “diverse” television creators drafted by Netflix (and to a lesser extent Amazon) but the Oscar-nominated Netflix films come from Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach?

This isn’t changing the film industry; this is gaming the film industry, leveraging the grand traditions of awards season — such a coincidence that the best films are so often about white guys and their myriad troubles — and giving them a double dose. (In the case of “The Two Popes,” quite literally.)

Just last year, it seemed as if Netflix were determined to both win and change the nature of a best picture. With “Roma,” the streamer put its money where its mouth was, insisting that Alfonso Cuarón’s quiet portrait of a Mexico City housekeeper was powerful enough to transcend American awards bias against all sorts of things, including subtitles, black and white films and movies about women.

Which it almost did; “Roma” won lots of awards, including Oscars for foreign language film, cinematography and directing, but the best picture went to the far more traditional “Green Book.”

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This year, well … I guess if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

For the Netflix-phobic among us, there might be some comfort in the knowledge that there is a force greater than the world domination-seeking streamer. But as that force appears to be a set of often quite specific if unspoken perimeters of “greatness,” that comfort is of the decidedly cold variety.

2020 Oscars race

If you don’t think such perimeters exist, consider that the best picture category was increased to a possible 10 only after “The Dark Knight” failed to get a nomination due to perceived comic-book bias. Last year, “Black Panther” broke that glass ceiling; this year, “Joker” overcame a lot of early outrage to receive more nominations than any other film.

So at least one sort of bias has been admitted and overcome.

“Joker” was not the only critically divisive film on the best picture list — “Jojo Rabbit,” which was also panned as often as it was praised, made the cut, while critical and audience hits including “The Farewell,” “Hustlers,” “Knives Out” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” were left out. All of which revolve around women and were made, with the exception of “Knives Out,” by female directors. Not that we should read anything into this.

Meanwhile, “Harriet,” the kind of historical epic that generally pleases motion picture academy voters (and one that defies cultural conventions predating film itself), got dinged in many reviews for being too formulaic. This is despite Cynthia Erivo’s astonishing, and Oscar-nominated, performance as a former slave turned verifiable action hero — a female character that somehow never made it to the center of a film before. It was never even discussed as a possibility for best picture, despite there being 10 slots available.

If only filmmaker Kasi Lemmons had thought to follow Harriet in a single shot through a world war complete with cameos by British heartthrobs past and present; if only Tubman had been forced to have imaginary conversations with best friend Jefferson Davis. If only “Harriet” had been made and marketed by Netflix.

Please do not willfully misunderstand. I’m not saying that “1917,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story” and “The Two Popes” are not great and/or awards-worthy films; I’m just saying that “formulaic” often wins big at the Oscars, but only when it’s a certain formula.

Nor am I blaming Netflix for the monochromatic tone of this year’s Oscars or for its overwhelming desire to win the film industry’s greatest award even as it attempts to completely destroy its business model and audience culture.

The way in which Netflix went about the Oscar race this year — no female directors, very traditional movies that focus almost exclusively on the personal illumination and/or transformation of white men — is disheartening, but not as disheartening as the level with which the streamer was rewarded for it. (“Dolemite Is My Name,” the lone major Netflix awards contender not centered on a white man, did not receive any nominations. And the streamer’s Cannes Film Festival acquisition, “Atlantics,” directed by Mati Diop, a French woman of Senegalese descent, was not nominated in the international feature category.)

Despite a growing and diversifying Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and small gains for international films and documentaries, this year’s Oscar nominees feel more like a retrenchment than a reflection of the narrative expansion the film industry claims to champion.

So here we are. With “Roma,” Netflix most certainly helped make room in the best picture field for “Parasite,” which is a very good thing, but this year it’s brought nothing new, and much that is old, to the table. And Oscar voters have embraced it whole-heartedly.

Which is not to say that old is bad. That this is the first time Jonathan Pryce has been nominated for an Oscar (for Netflix’s “The Two Popes”) is absolutely shocking, and one of the most egregious omissions on Oscar morning was that of Robert De Niro from the lead acting category.

How on earth can anyone consider “The Irishman” a candidate for best picture without celebrating De Niro’s (as ever) tremendous performance? If he wasn’t also a producer of “The Irishman,” I wouldn’t blame him if he skipped the whole thing — who wants to sit through another evening of being praised as if you were dead instead of a very much still-working actor who gave a tremendous performance in a best picture favorite?

But no doubt De Niro will be there, supporting his film, his costars and, yes, Netflix, and after much complaining about the narrow demographic representation in too many categories, so will the rest of us. Declining ratings notwithstanding, the Oscar telecast remains the second-biggest live event on television, and for a reason: The Academy Awards matter.

Which is why all the parsing and analysis should not be misconstrued as cancel culture. No one who cares about film in any way wants the Oscars gone. But if Netflix is going to disrupt things, it would be nice if that disruption extended to the way we define “best.”

Cynthia Erivo reacts to her double Oscar nominations and being the sole nominee of color in the four acting categories.

British actress Cynthia Erivo received her first two Oscar nominations on Monday morning for her performance as the iconic freedom fighter and abolitionist Harriet Tubman in Kasi Lemmons’ “Harriet” and for co-writing that film’s anthemic original song “Stand Up” (with Joshuah Brian Campbell).

In the wake of notable snubs for the likes of Jennifer Lopez (“Hustlers”), Jamie Foxx (“Just Mercy”) and Lupita Nyong’o (“Us”), Erivo was the only person of color nominated for an acting Oscar this year.

Hours after the nominations announcement on Monday morning, Erivo got on the phone from Japan, where she’d just landed to discuss her nominations and the legacy of #OscarsSoWhite.

First of all, congratulations! What were you doing when you got the news?

Cynthia Erivo: Thank you. I was however many feet and miles in the air on the way to Japan on a plane.

Who gave you the news?

I found out that I had WiFi on the plane, hooked up my phone to the WiFi, and I think this was like an hour or so after it had been announced. And many people gave me the news because a bunch of tweets, messages, texts, voicemails and DMs started coming through. I can’t remember which was the first text message I got, it just all happened.

Who was the first person you responded to?

Who was the first person I responded to? I have no idea, I can’t even remember. I think I probably messaged my mother first because I don’t know that she realized it was happening. She’s in London so it wasn’t in the news until much later. I must’ve messaged my mother and my sister first and then I probably messaged my agent and my PR because we had to have conversations. I may be wrong because I can’t even remember.

Do you mind me asking what you’re doing in Japan?

I’ve got a concert. I’m singing at three concerts that I’m going to be doing with two other artists.

How are you going to celebrate? Are you going to do it there or wait until you come back?

I think I’m going to wait until I come back so I can do it with my friends and family. Here I’m going to be working. I may purchase something nice for myself [laughs].

How does it feel to be the sole acting nominee of color?

It is bittersweet really and truly because while I worked very hard for what was happening I also would have loved to be able to celebrate with other people of color who worked really hard this year also. I believe there has been incredible work this year and beautiful pieces that have come out not just by people of color but women directors as well. So I’m hoping that I can represent us well once that celebration happens.

Did you know that if you win you’ll become the youngest and fastest EGOT winner in history?

I have been told that, yes. Which is crazy. But no I didn’t think that it would be at this point [in my career] because I didn’t even know it was possible to do all those things with a Broadway musical. So it’s just wonderful to even have it discussed in this way.

What was your reaction when BAFTA asked you to perform despite failing to nominate any actors of color?

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It was a no, really, because I just felt like it was indicative of what they thought of performers [of color] like myself. I just thought it didn’t make sense to go and perform when there were literally none — none, at all.

How does it feel to achieve this recognition for playing such an iconic historical figure?

It feels great because hopefully it means that people will start learning about her and wanting to be interested in the work that Harriet did. I hope that it makes her proud, I hope it makes her family proud. I hope that people see this and want to know more about her and I’m glad to be one of the representatives of her history. And I hope that it encourages more people to tell the story.

You’re just the 11th black woman to be nominated for a lead actress trophy in the Oscars’ history. Does that create pressure being in such a potentially history-making position so early in your career?

I don’t think it creates pressure [but] I do think it’s sad that there’s only one woman of color who has won that award. I do hope that that changes at some point. I hope it stops becoming an anomaly when it happens. There are so many women of color, black women, who have been working in this industry who deserve and have deserved to be celebrated in that way and I hope it starts becoming more of the norm, to be honest. To be only the 11th is staggering and so I’m hoping that changes at some point.

Since the academy so often overlooks artists of color, do you think that we should continue to take stock in their opinions of the best movies and performances of the year?

Yes and no. It’s a hard question to answer because I do think that there are people in it that do believe in good moviemaking and good actors. But I think that sometimes it’s subjective. I think it’s also up to us to celebrate the pieces that don’t necessarily get celebrated at award ceremonies in our own way because not being nominated does not make it not a good movie. Something can be beautiful and not be celebrated but that is then up to us to make sure that it is. That’s what I think. Yes it highlights some of the movies of the year that are great but if it misses some of these films, I think our job is then to highlight those movies to make sure people see them.

SERIES

NCIS The team investigates the crash of an F-18 fighter jet and the disappearance of its pilot in this new episode of the procedural drama. Mark Harmon, David McCallum and Wilmer Valderrama star. 8 p.m. CBS

Crisis on Infinite Earths The massive superhero crossover event concludes with new episodes of “Arrow” and “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.” 8 and 9 p.m. CW

Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time The tournament featuring Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer continues. 8 p.m. ABC

The Resident While they’re working at a nonprofit clinic hours away from Atlanta, Nic and Mina (Emily VanCamp, Shaunette Rene Wilson) treat a patient whose ventricular assist device is failing. Back at Chastain, Conrad (Matt Czuchry) gets a call from a desperate former patient being sued for medical expenses by Red Rock Medical. Manish Dayal, Bruce Greenwood and Morris Chestnut also star. 8 p.m. Fox

Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Host Henry Louis Gates Jr. reveals unexpected details in the family trees of Queen Latifah and Jeffrey Wright (“Westworld”). 8 p.m. KOCE and KPBS

FBI A bank holdup leads the team to a safe deposit box whose contents have the potential to damage national security in this new episode. Missy Peregrym, Zeeko Zaki and Ebonee Noel star. 9 p.m. CBS

This Is Us Kevin (Justin Hartley) is on a serious quest to find a romantic partner and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) makes a trip to Los Angeles to be with Rebecca (Mandy Moore). Chrissy Metz and Chris Sullivan also star as the drama returns with new episodes. 9 p.m. NBC

Mixed-ish Rainbow (Arica Himmel) wants to battle stereotypes at school after she joins the track team and feels like her friends see only her skin color in this new episode. 9 p.m. ABC

Frontline The conclusion of the two-part “America’s Great Divide: Obama to Trump” recalls how President Donald Trump’s campaign heightened the country’s divisions and how his presidency has instigated anger on both sides of the cultural divide. 9 p.m. KOCE and KPBS

black-ish Dre (Anthony Anderson) is torn at the office between looking out for Junior (Marcus Scribner) and letting him make his own mistakes in this new episode. Tracee Ellis Ross also stars. 9:30 p.m. ABC

New Amsterdam Helen and Max (Freema Agyeman, Ryan Eggold) are in a potentially deadly situation after patients from Rikers escape from their beds and the hospital goes into lockdown in this new episode of the medical drama. Tyler Labine and Janet Montgomery also star. 10 p.m. NBC

Emergence Jo and Agent Brooks (Allison Tolman, Enver Gjokaj) assemble a team as they attempt to communicate with Piper (Alexa Swinton). Owain Yeoman, Rowena King and Donald Faison also star. 10 p.m. ABC

Running Wild With Bear Grylls Radio personality Bobby Bones joins Bear Grylls in a massive Norwegian fjord in this new episode. 10 p.m. National Geographic

SPECIALS

Democratic Presidential Debate CNN and the Des Moines Register host candidates Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer and Elizabeth Warren, from Des Moines, Iowa. 6 and 10 p.m. CNN

Post-Debate Analysis Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo host a panel of experts. 8:15 p.m. CNN

TALK SHOWS

CBS This Morning (N) 7 a.m. KCBS

Today Colin O’Brady; Little Big Town performs. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC

KTLA Morning News (N) 7 a.m. KTLA

Good Morning America Niecy Nash; John Walsh and Callahan Walsh. (N) 7 a.m. KABC

Good Day L.A. Emergency physician Medell Briggs; author James McCourt; Carly Pearce performs. (N) 7 a.m. KTTV

Live With Kelly and Ryan Tyler Perry (“A Fall From Grace”). (N) 9 a.m. KABC

The View Leslie Jones. (N) 10 a.m. KABC

Rachael Ray Joy Behar (“The View”); Rohan Oza (“Shark Tank”). (N) 10 a.m. KTTV

The Wendy Williams Show Michelle Buteau (“The Circle”); animal expert Dave Mizejewski. (N) 11 a.m. KTTV

The Talk Kellan Lutz; Julian McMahon; Brigitte Nielsen. (N) 1 p.m. KCBS

Tamron Hall Yara Shahidi (“Grown-ish”); 11-year-old Skye Turner portrays both Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin. (N) 1 p.m. KABC, 1:07 a.m. KABC

The Dr. Oz Show Grandparents of two missing children speak out about their fear that the family is part of a cult. (N) 1 p.m. KTTV

The Kelly Clarkson Show Rob Lowe; Madelaine Petsch; Skid Row Running Club. (N) 2 p.m. KNBC

Dr. Phil Three women want to shut down a Christian boarding school they were made to attend as teens. (N) 3 p.m. KCBS

The Ellen DeGeneres Show Rami Malek; guest host Robert Downey Jr. (“Dolittle”). (N) 3 p.m. KNBC

The Real Angela Robinson (“The Haves and the Have Nots”). (N) 3 p.m. KTTV

The Doctors Developments in USA gymnastics and Michigan State University sexual abuse scandal. (N) 3 p.m. KCOP

Amanpour and Company (N) 11 p.m. KCET; midnight KVCR; 1 a.m. KLCS

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The Daily Show With Trevor Noah Rick Wilson. (N) 11 p.m. Comedy Central

Conan Walton Goggins; Fahim Anwar. (N) 11 p.m. TBS

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Tyler Perry; Yara Shahidi; Black Pumas perform. (N) 11:34 p.m. KNBC

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. (N) 11:35 p.m. KCBS

Jimmy Kimmel Live! Allison Janney; Ilana Glazer; Scarypoolparty performs. (N) 11:35 p.m. KABC

The Late Late Show With James Corden Steve Buscemi; Tim Roth; SHAED performs. (N) 12:37 a.m. KCBS

Late Night With Seth Meyers Will Smith; comedian Michael Cruz Kayne. (N) 12:37 a.m. KNBC

Nightline (N) 12:37 a.m. KABC

A Little Late With Lilly Singh Actress Francia Raisa; actress Debby Ryan. (N) 1:38 a.m. KNBC

SPORTS

NHL Hockey The Kings visit the Tampa Bay Lightning, 4 p.m. Fox Sports Net; the Minnesota Wild visit the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4 p.m. NBCSP

NBA Basketball The Cleveland Cavaliers visit the Clippers, 7:30 p.m. FS Prime

For more sports on TV, see the Sports section.

Around 2:30 Sunday afternoon, Zubin Mehta had likely just finished conducting Siegfried’s heroic “Funeral Music” as part of his Los Angeles Philharmonic Wagner program at Walt Disney Concert Hall. At that same time, several miles down the 710 Freeway, comic book aficionados were no doubt celebrating superheroes galore at Long Beach Comic Expo in the convention center, while opera fans next door at the Beverly O’Neill Theater had taken their seats for Long Beach Opera’s new production of Purcell’s “King Arthur.” There is a good chance Donald Trump was flexing heroic tweeting fingers that moment as well.

And in some startlingly deep-time, parallel reality, mirrorverse way, all these activities happened to be connected.

You may recall that John Boorman’s 1981 “Excalibur” (arguably the best of King Arthur movies, excepting, of course, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) grabs immediate attention by opening with Siegfried’s “Funeral Music.” Wagner, after all, got his sword-in-the-stone idea from the Arthurian legend.

Meanwhile, Long Beach Opera, as ever priding itself with radically rethinking repertory, has done a full refashioning of the first great “King Arthur” opera (there aren’t many, but Chausson’s “Le Roi Arthus” is a neglected beauty). Arthur here becomes the comic book delusional fantasy of a pudgy, narcissistic, emigrant-phobic politico requiring psychiatric treatment.

Well, you’ve got to do something with this 17th century British “semi-opera.” There is Purcell’s fetching score with some of the sweetest music ever to come from the fairest isle. There is poet John Dryden’s libretto. In what had been at the time a Brexit from the concept of European opera, the two seldom meet.

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A long, florid play, “King Arthur or The British Worthy,” centers not on Camelot but Arthur’s Saxon campaign. Merlin has but a bit part. In five lavish acts, music, dance and fantastical stage apparatus is used more for theatrical spectacle than drama. There are pagan ceremonies, lusty shepherds, patriotic odes, love songs, nature at its business, a frost scene that has to be heard to be believed and a major influence on late 20th century British minimalism.

LBO chocks all that. Its “King Arthur” in this non-proscenium small theater opens with a stage empty but for a bed. A small orchestra — the esteemed early music ensemble, Musica Angelica — is seated behind a large screen on which there will be video projections.

A man in a suit enters. He strips to his underwear. His T-shirt is red with a large A in a circle. He picks up a comic book. He switches on a TV and hears the latest about plans for our southern border. The president is suggesting electrifying a wall or shooting migrants in the leg.

“These comments sound like they are out of a biting satire about a xenophobic leader,” the conductor, stage director, designer and LBO artistic and general director Andreas Mitisek writes in the program book, “but they are the real scary thoughts voiced by a President of the USA.

“With our REDUX of King Arthur, we use satire to comment on the political climate around us.”

Then, again, Dryden begins the original spoken prologue to his play lamenting a “Dearth of Wit in this dull Town / When silly Plays so savourly go down.”

Arthur King is a patient at Camelot O’Neil, a behavioral residence mental health unit. His sexy nurse is Gwen E. Veer. His buddy is another patient, Lance E. Lott. Doc Oswald runs the dubious joint.

Mitisek then takes apart the opera, adapting Purcell’s music to fit new circumstances and a completely new theatrical structure. His cutup rearranges, revises, reorders and reduces Purcell’s score. The occasional Dryden line is retained, but much of the sung text is new. Five acts become a single uninterrupted one under two hours.

Our schlumpy, Trumpian Arthur thinks he can save the world from aliens. He can be ridiculously pompous, Drydenesque even. He can also be sympathetically vulnerable.

There is no dearth of wit here as a silly play adapted by the satirical collective, Culture Clash, goes savourly down. What prevents many crude antics from getting too annoying — and pretty much takes the bite out of the political satire — is Purcell’s irresistible score and an outstanding cast.

Marc Molomot is a hugely charismatic Arthur. A superb actor, he is as much Jimmy Durante as a Trump wannabe, capable of winning our affections with a depth of expression once he begins to sing. Much can be equally said of Jamie Chamberlin’s feisty, funny Gwen; of Cedric Berry’s magnetically cheesy Doc Oswald; of countertenor Darryl Taylor’s snappy Lance. With this cast you simply can’t go wrong.

For his part, Mitisek leads a musically excellent performance and, in yet another of his hats, contributes effectively goofy video imagery.

In the end, Purcell wins, Dryden loses, Trump gets a pass and British opera really Brexits. Could it be that this “King Arthur” is not such an alternate reality after all?

Getting to the slopes of Taos, N.M., just got a whole lot easier. Last week Taos Air started nonstop flights between L.A. and the Southwest town — with airfares that don’t cost a fortune. Seasonal flights leave from Hawthorne Municipal Airport (HHR), not LAX, which also makes for an easy in and out.

The charter service aims to shuttle skiers and snowboarders to the Taos Ski Valley resort, but anyone can take the two-hour hop. Taos Air flies a 30-seat Dornier 328 jet on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays that fall on Mondays, through March 29. Travelers may arrive up to 30 minutes before their flight to check in and are allowed to take two bags for free. Fliers also receive free shuttle rides to Ski Valley.

On Taos Air’s website, I found tickets for the upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. holiday priced at $255 outbound on Jan. 16 and $295 return Jan. 20. Commercial airlines don’t land in Taos; the nearest airport would be Santa Fe, about 70 miles southwest of the town. A recent search on Kayak.com showed LAX-Santa Fe flights for $652 round-trip on American Airlines. Flight time is 3½ hours (stopping in Phoenix) each way. Other commercial flights routed through Denver take even longer.

Taos Air also flies to the New Mexico ski town from McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad, and from Dallas and Austin in Texas.

Info: Taos Air

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