It was a rainy Valentine’s Day and a smug coupledom seemed to be all around. Therefore it seemed rather ironic to be attending a preview for Lorca’s play Blood Wedding – a tragedy of unfulfilled love.

However, the Valentine’s buzz was immediately shaken off me as I was shown into the rehearsal room by Amelia Cherry, the producer. There were three groups forcefully acting several different scenes, some of them dancing. My immediate impression was that I was disturbing the meeting of some sort of cult.

Speaking to the director, Connie Treves, she explains to me her vision for the play. “The play is abstract enough to synthesise dance and movement, which is one of my interests, the language is lyrical and yet the plot is very simple. It’s all about heat.” She laughs, “Although we aren’t setting our production in Spain as Lorca might have imagined, I want that heat to come across instead in the acting of the movement and through the music.”

Connie calls the three groups to present the scenes they had been working on to me and the other actors. “Like show and tell!” laughs David McFarlane, the musical director. He was joking, of course, but this is somewhat how it feels. I can’t deny that the passion felt by the acting in the room is tangeable: the heat Connie speaks of is certainly coming across in the scenes I observe. They are from different areas of the play and, thus, each have a very different feel. The first I might have said was realism, the second quite physical, and the third somewhere in between. It will be interesting to see how the scenes link together within the whole play. 

Talking to Bee Liese, who plays the bride, and Josh Ames-Blackaby, who plays Leonardo, I get a sense of how they are interpreting their characters. “Leonardo is three-dimensional, but the play tests how far the audience will sympathise with him,” says Josh. “They might see his actions as purely destructive, but they might also forgive him because he is acting on love. A bit like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.” I ask Bee how she’s trying to put across her female character in relation to this – is she passive or powerful? “She’s certainly a strong character and in many ways she’s in control, although she may not say much. There’s a constant feeling that she’s being observed, and I think that’s partly what they play is about.”

I slyly ask the pair what they think of Connie’s approach: Josh has already worked with her physical style last term on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They are both fans. “She has a clear vision,” says Bee and tells me how paintings were brought to the early rehearsals which Connie asked the actors to respond to. She had them physically act out their lines rather than speak them. “It’s a really fresh approach. The fact she invites us to devise how we want the scenes to be encourages us to really engage with the play. It makes my work with Josh intimate and personal because we’ve come up with it ourselves.”

Overall, it’s great to see a student production that’s truly multi-disciplinary, outside of musical theatre. The group are full of life. Not something to miss.

Blood Wedding runs at St John’s College Auditorium from Wednesday 25th until Friday 27th February.

As everyone knows, we live in the age of mediated atrocity. Every day, in all the lurid media of modern life we grow ever more piteously accustomed to the sad arrangements, the crowds of the displaced and the dead. In the age of The Image, we need an ethics of The Image. But we don’t have an ethics of The Image. We’re not even close. We have the aesthetics, of course, but not the ethics, not yet.

Tim Crouch, like all of us, has grown up in the age of mediated atrocity. Unlike all of us, he is also a mediator of atrocity and is one of his generation’s finest. The Author, which was performed (in lieu of an more fitting word) on Thursday of 4th Week at the Michael Pilch Studio by a cast of immensely talented actors, is Crouch’s take on the ethics of The Image and of mediated atrocity. Like any work where the essential concern is ethics, it is at times heavy-handed, and only sometimes veers perilously close to the moral fable. But I have rarely seen (or read) a work that plays with these much played-with themes so intelligently and intriguingly.

The set-up is unconventional. Gone is the stage. Instead, we have four rows of audience, split down the centre, each half of two rows facing the other half. The actors – the roles – are positioned in the audience. One of the actors plays The Author, Tim Crouch. Two others, using their own names, play actors who’ve worked previously with Crouch in what emerges to have been an exceptionally harrowing play. The fourth is a theatre-goer, our closest point of reference as an audience. It is he who begins the show.

Each of the actors elaborates and comments upon the development, rehearsal and production of a play by Crouch. We learn, as their accounts turn darker, that the perverse process of this play’s production becomes abusive and exploitative. At one dreadful point, Crouch practically forces one of his actors – with the complicity of us, the audience – to play the part of a sexually abused woman whom they’ve interviewed as preparation. We are goaded on to probe a little deeper, to ask her questions. Some do. We learn also that the cast went to “The War” and witnessed “The Massacres” (always these monstrous generics) for the betterment of their art.

How do we explore the relationship and co-dependency of suffering? What are the ethics of the exploitation of real human pain for artistic gain? And, in the midst of all this, how can we jusify the complicity of an audience hungry for more as we face each other and listen to these horrors? These are old and serious questions, but they are rarely posed as intelligently and disturbingly as Crouch has done here.

It’s Oscar time, and whether or not you’re a fan of the ceremony (with its countless musical interludes, frequently cringe-worthy script, and some awkward actor pairings if ever there were any), it’s hard not to get caught up in the awards season build up – it does last about a quarter of the year after all. This inevitably leads to the prediction game. What follows is a series of will win/ should win, wherein I give my opinions, guesses and slightly more educated guesses as to the outcomes in the major categories on Sunday.

Best Picture:

It’s always nice when a Best Picture category seems to reflect a strong and diverse year for cinema – think 2010, a year when the line-up had room for such varied entries as The Social Network, Toy Story 3, Black Swan and Inception. Although the same cannot be said for this year’s roster (due in large part to its reduced size – only 8 films have been nominated this time, thanks to a voting system so convoluted that not even Academy members quite seem to understand it), it is nonetheless bolstered by a number of ambitious, original and (in general) wildly successful admissions such as critical darlings Boyhood and Whiplash, both of which premiered over 12 months ago, at 2014’s Sundance Festival. Unfortunately, the other films which pad out the Best Picture category reveal an even stronger showing than usual from the annual Oscar bait biopics, from the perfectly good to The Imitation Game.

A year of extremes then, and as such neither the best nor the worst in recent history, but which are the frontrunners? This appears to be a two horse race; Boyhood is coming in strong after a win at the Baftas last week (their Best Film award has agreed with the Oscar champion since 2008), while Birdman has been gaining momentum through successive wins at the Producers’ Guild, Screen Actors’ Guild and Directors’ Guild Awards – in the past, this triple crown has almost always led to Academy gold. It’s not an easy category to mark and predictions have been split both ways, but in the end I can’t help thinking of Birdman as the outsider. Whilst acknowledging Boyhood‘s mighty achievements, it does seem to fall more in line with expected Academy preferences, and though the membership has shown a taste for movies about the industry (with recent winners including Argo and The Artist), Birdman is an altogether different beast, lacking the warm heart or Hollywood heroics that may have propelled those films to victory. Plus, the Academy has a precedent for rewarding critically lauded depictions of 12-year journeys to freedom.

No matter – either possibility would be a win for film fans, and both are daring, brilliantly presented visions the likes of which haven’t been seen in this category for some time (perhaps since 2007’s No Country for Old Men/There Will Be Blood head to head). My personal pick of the bunch however is Whiplash, a gripping, piercingly intense look into obsession and the price we will pay to achieve our dreams, with a killer soundtrack to boot.

Will win: Boyhood

Should win: Whiplash

Best Director:

This looks to play similarly to the above category, with Iñárritu and Linklater (helmers of Birdman and Boyhood respectively) the key figures. Boyhood in particular can be seen as a highly director-driven, logistically demanding pet project, one which was over a decade in the making. Iñárritu’s Birdman is the flashier of the two however (with its striking ‘done-in-one-take’ surface), and his win at the Director’s Guild Awards lends him serious weight in the category.

The deciding factor here may be a desire among the voters to spread the wealth between its top films (and who can argue? It can be awfully dull when one film sweeps the major awards), which could well result in a win for Iñárritu to complement Boyhood winning Best Picture. The precedent is there, with last year seeing a split between 12 Years a Slave and Gravity, and Argo and Life of Pi the year before that. Of course it could swing the other way, with Birdman winning Best Film and Linklater taking Best Director, but that seems less likely, especially given the trend in the last two years of honouring the director of the more visually dazzling contender.

Will win: Iñárritu

Should win: Iñárritu

Best Actress:

Now for a category which is much simpler to predict. From the Critic’s Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, to the SAGs and the BAFTAs, Julianne Moore hasn’t missed a step in her awards campaign, and she now stands set to take the Oscar which she has for so many years deserved, for her portrayal in Still Alice of a linguistics professor struggling to come to terms with her future after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I haven’t seen the film yet (and so it is excluded from ‘Should win’), but it will be wonderful to see one of the most phenomenally talented actors of her generation finally rewarded, having been nominated four times in the past, losing out each time (her performance in 1997’s Boogie Nights, for which she was nominated in the Supporting Actress category, is particularly outstanding). This feeling among voters of a superb actor finally receiving her due will only add to the momentum, and this category is surely one of the most secure locks of the night.

Choosing a favourite from the other contenders is difficult in this remarkably strong category (with the exception of Felicity Jones’ performance in The Theory of Everything, which was… fine) but if anyone rises above the pack, it is probably Rosamund Pike for her bizarre but utterly mesmerising turn in David Fincher’s thriller Gone Girl, which was sadly and unfairly ignored in the nominations for the other major Oscar categories. Reese Witherspoon and Marion Cotillard both turned in excellent performances as well, elevating premises of questionable interest to totally gripping fare.

Will win: Julianne Moore

Should win: Rosamund Pike (…or Julianne Moore)

Best Actor:

Here is another two man contest, and one with my most pronounced will win/should win divide yet: Eddie Redmayne’s chances (for his strong but *very* Oscar-centric role as a young Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything) are looking ever more favourable as he comes out of wins at the Baftas and Screen Actors’ Guild Awards (which, crucially, has correctly predicted the eventual Oscar winner for more than a decade and makes up the Academy’s largest voting branch), while Michael Keaton’s standing seems to be slipping despite an early win at the Critic’s Choice Awards.

Yet in this writer’s opinion, Keaton’s perfectly cast, self-referential turn in Birdman as Riggan Thomson, a washed up actor desperate to stage a comeback with a new self-directed Broadway production, ain’t the same ballpark, it ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same f*ckin’ sport (end quote), and nothing on Oscar night would give me greater pleasure than seeing Keaton collect the statue that I believe he truly deserves for this by turns bitter, tortured, moving and hilarious powerhouse performance. It is by no means a long shot either – the man is obviously a veteran and he has a heck of a legacy, so support for him is sure to be strong among the voting body. This is another difficult race to call, and one which I will be greatly invested in come Sunday night.

Will win: Eddie Redmayne by a hair

Should win: Michael Keaton by a length

Best Supporting Actor:

With the exception of Leading Actor, the acting categories this year are the most secure of the lot, and in this case it’s J.K. Simmons who’s primed to take the award for his work bringing tyrannical bandleader Terence Fletcher to life in Whiplash. Simmons has won every major award from the Globe to the Bafta, and who are we to argue? This performance is a career best, an exhilarating thrill ride that people will talk about for years to come, and clearly industry voters agree – this category is straightforward, as it should be.

Will win: J.K. Simmons

Should win: J.K. Simmons

Best Supporting Actress:

This category is rather weaker than its male counterpart, due to such inclusions as Keira Knightley (lacking any flair in The Imitation Game, though to be fair she didn’t have much chance with that script) and Emma Stone (for my money the sole weak link in the otherwise excellent Birdman ensemble), but a strong frontrunner has emerged all the same: in this case it’s Patricia Arquette’s to lose.

In the same vein as Moore and Simmons, she’s gradually built up unstoppable momentum, winning all the big awards for her wonderfully honest role as a mother doing her best to raise her children in Boyhood, and being heaped with critical acclaim straight from the film’s premiere over a year ago. Arquette is a deserving winner, though I would personally love to see Laura Dern take the prize for her devastating performance which lies at the fiercely beating heart of Wild (again as a single mother trying to do right by her children), the film about a woman (Witherspoon) hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in an effort to come to terms with her past.

Will win: Patricia Arquette

Should win: Laura Dern

Best Original Screenplay:

Big awards favourites Boyhood and Birdman are certainly contenders here, but it’s Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel which finds itself pulling ahead, after last minute wins at the Baftas and Writers’ Guild Awards. The script sees Anderson firing on all cylinders, and it sparkles in a way that the other contenders can’t match – Birdman‘s script is a little inconsistent (particularly in the scenes between Ed Norton and Emma Stone), Nightcrawler is a wild ride but flawed (and would perhaps belong more in categories such as Editing and Best Actor), and Foxcatcher‘s screenplay is probably about fifteen pages, judging by the word-per-minute snail’s pace at which the dialogue is delivered.

Looking good for Wes Anderson then, especially if Academy members are indeed adopting the spreading-of-wealth approach, given that Boyhood and Birdman are more likely winners in the Film and Director categories.

Will win: Grand Budapest Hotel

Should win: Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Adapted Screenplay:

This is a particularly unclear category, and not because there’s a wealth of quality on offer, unfortunately. The Imitation Game was pipped to be the leader of the group before a surprise victory for The Theory of Everything at the Baftas, though a win for the former on Saturday at the Writers’ Guild Awards and a predictably tasteless Oscar campaign from Harvey Weinstein (urging voters to ‘Honor this movie. Honor this man’) may see it regain its composure.

A saviour may come in the form of Whiplash, the film with the brilliant script which is absolutely not adapted – an Oscar technicality has landed this screenplay in the wrong category, which works hugely in its favour as it has left behind the far stronger Original Screenplay lineup, where it had little to no chance. As such, we have not had an opportunity to see how Whiplash fares against this weaker competition (as it hasn’t been nominated in the Adapted Screenplay categories elsewhere), so it stands as something of a wild card.

With very little evidence to go on, I’ll simply back Whiplash with all my heart (partly in desperation) and hope that something other than The Imitation Game wins on the night.

Will win: Whiplash… please…

Should win: Whiplash

“Recite the preamble of the Constitution.” It’s the first question the courthouse registrar asks Annie Lee Cooper, a black activist trying to register to vote. His second question concerns the number of county judges in Alabama. His third, their names. All 67.

From its opening sequence, Selma is out to stir us. We watch Cooper, played by Oprah Winfrey, painstakingly fill out a voting registration form at her local courthouse. We watch her steady, systematic humiliation. The snappy overhead shot which shows the triumphant registrar’s white hand stamp “DENIED” over her form serves as the film’s first impetus for outrage. Paul Webb’s screenplay spares no opportunity for tear-jerking, from beaten old men to weeping mothers. There is one thing stopping the film from being a plangent melodrama: all of these moving ‘set-pieces’ are not, in fact, cinematic devices, but facts. There is a strange look of duty on the faces of my fellow film-watchers, a sense that they are there to take necessary medicine. The woman to my left tuts and hisses to signal her strong disapproval at each racist act.

Still, though, Ava Duvernay’s Selma doesn’t read like a textbook blockbuster resurrection of history’s darker panels – the kind lost somewhere between a miasma of self-flagellation, and the lavish, lurid throttle of the Hollywood sob-machine. Rather, this film is an exercise in focus, and nuance.

It centres around one distinct segment of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s: the battle for African-American voting rights. While constitutionally allowed to vote, black Americans were prevented from registering by polling taxes, absurd questions, and ‘exams’ to probe ‘Americanness’, or just plain intimidation.

Selma, a strongly white town in rural Alabama, provides the main setting, although the film’s two other main locations, the White House, and Martin Luther King’s rented home in Atlanta, are significant. Selma has a good eye for the complex internal discord between factions like the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Its recreation of Oval office negotiations also has a chilling, cynical authenticity, both in dialogue as well as in some of its shot compositions.

As for its portrayal of King himself, it treads a fine line between acknowledging the defamation he may have undergone at the hands of Edgar J. Hoover’s FBI, and the sacralisation he certainly enjoyed in the aftermath of Birmingham and St Augustine. Where it occasionally falls into the latter trend, there are also comparatively quiet domestic scenes between King and his wife Coretta which reveal a fragile, fallible man.

Selma is aided by its strong cast. Oyelowo as MLK is a great mix of fervency and doubt; Carmen Ejogo conveys his wife’s life of harassment and fear for her family with brilliant minimalism; and the SCLC leadership works convincingly as a simmering political ensemble. Lorraine Toussaint, who notoriously starred as the psychopathic but oh-so-badass ‘V’ on Orange Is The New Black, makes a striking cameo as Amelia Boynton, the Georgian civil rights activist.

As a whole, the film has one salient low point: its soundtrack. While it’s not distractingly awful, it seems to do what the cinematography, screenplay, and actors have clearly just about avoided. The score plays directly, unimaginatively, into the well-grooved tracks of everything we might expect. Sad piano for sad death, growing bass for growing march.

Nevertheless, Selma is definitely worth the ride. What it lays out for us is frequently difficult to look straight at – hopefully a marker that it contains some grains of truth, and challenge. Expect to feel, and feel viscerally. There are far worse ways to get politically motivated.

From the directors and producers of the Matrix trilogy, V For Vendetta, and Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending promised to bring yet another ground-breaking cinematic sensation to the world this week. Yet no amount of impressive futuristic backdrops, consistently dramatised combats, or even a cast of such a wide and talented variety could quite save Jupiter Ascending from crashing to the ground.

The plot itself is unnecessarily complicated yet under-developed and terribly confusing. Jupiter Jones, the daughter of a Russian illegal immigrant working in Chicago, discovers that she is in fact the reincarnation of a universally powerful woman who lived over 90,000 years ago, and is wanted dead by two of her three utterly charming children. Having inherited the Earth, Jupiter travels effortlessly from planet to planet across the galaxy and then to and from Earth in a series of disorientating negotiations with space creatures, and her children from her previous life; including her seductive son Titus, played by Douglas Booth, who attempts to marry her. Followed around faithfully by Caine Wise, a spliced human wolf with wings, played rather expressionlessly by the odd teen-dream choice of Channing Tatum, Jupiter and Caine proceed to fall in love, and so after saving the world, unpredictably live happily ever after.

From the very beginning, the narrative is a patchwork of hurried snippets and snatches of melodramatic conversation, which on occasion burst into a bewildering flurry of high-tech chases to theatrically orchestrated music. Not only does the narrative flow just about as seamlessly as the neglected diary of a hormonal 12 year old, with repeated outbursts of, “I hate my life!”; the actors themselves seem quite unable to convincingly fit into their roles and adapt themselves to their new universe. With the exception of Eddie Redmayne, who plays soft-spoken antagonist Balem Abrasax, and who seems to hold not only the failing fragments of the plot together, but also, rather conveniently, the entire universe, the cast perform on a scale ranging from mildly acceptable to amusingly appalling.

Between the recycling of various action scenes and conveniently shortcut sections to avoid the exposure of a flawed script, the film does display an extraordinary parade of breathless backdrops and highly digitalised futuristic cityscapes, not to mention the artistically inventive costumes.

Perhaps one of the most impressive scenes is that of Jupiter’s wedding inside the spaceship’s very own converted gothic cathedral, which is filmed at Ely Cathedral. Its visually enriching aesthetics, however, seem wasted on the work as a whole; they are deserving of an adequately written script at least. Although the film is capable of entertaining, it is to be taken lightheartedly and without any expectations, for the seriousness with which the narrative and the actors take themselves makes it impossible to take it seriously at all.

The embarrassment at this truly cringeworthy film would have left the whole audience in laughable disbelief had there been any one else in the cinema bar my rather reluctant companion. I cannot criticise the inhabitants of Oxford for neglecting this unexceptional spectacle of random dream-like bewilderment. I myself will feel no inclination to buy the DVD.