A recent meeting to discuss the council’s proposals to close 20 out of its 43 libraries saw an impressive turn-out. About 300 people: ranging from students to workers; librarians to library users; the elderly to the very young, gathered in Oxford Town Hall to express their concern. No doubt the kids were mostly there to see Philip Pullman, the most eminent of the four speakers, but nonetheless it says something about the broad public appreciation of libraries. It is not only librarians who will suffer from the planned closures.

Everyone had stories to share about why libraries mattered to them. Librarians told of school children who had neither internet nor a quiet place to work at home, and of eighty year-olds for whom a library might provide the only human contact that day.A lecturer spoke of how his library had inspired him to become the first member of his family to go to university, and of his disabled son, for whom the library was vital. One campaigner read out a statement from a working mother who had spoken little English when she moved here, and found her library one of the only places where she felt warm, safe and welcomed.

Sure, these stories are sentimental, but they are also true. What sort of message do we send to all these people if we take libraries away from them?

The best storyteller was, of course, Philip Pullman. He began with an epic tale of the destruction of libraries in Alexandria, before recalling his own delight as a child in becoming a ‘citizen of the great republic of reading’ at his local library in Battersea. He mocked the government’s plan to put libraries in the hands of volunteers instead of local authorities, joking that Cameron’s ‘big society’ must indeed be big to contain all these volunteers with so much free time. He went on to challenge the wider government cuts, declaring our society haunted by the ‘greedy ghosts’ of capitalism, although he added lightly that ‘he didn’t blame Oxfordshire council for the whole degeneration of Western civilization’.

Whether or not you’re on Pullman’s side about cuts to public spending; whether you consider them a pragmatic necessity or entirely ideological, the assault on libraries seem pretty inexcusable. It is not only Oxfordshire libraries that are facing closure: across the country it is estimated that as many as 1 in 5 libraries are at risk, and in some areas- such as the Isle of Wight, where 9 out of 11 libraries have been earmarked for closure- figures are even more shocking. These cuts reveal just how empty statements such as ‘we’re all in it together’ are: the poor will undoubtedly be hit the hardest. The fact that the library in Blackbird Leys, one of Europe’s biggest housing estates, is set to close, while the library in David Cameron’s own constituency of Witney is safe, completely undermines the coalition’s pretences of fairness.

So what can we do to save our libraries? The strategy taken up by users of one Milton Keynes library- everyone withdrew their maximum allowance of books at once in order to convey the scale of the threat- is probably not the best one, though amusing. Oxfordshire residents were urged to write to their counsellors citing a breach of the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act, which requires library services to be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘improving’, to file a formal complaint at the council’s offices, and to join anti-cuts demonstrations in London. One speaker suggested that we calculate the cost to the government in providing bus passes for all those residents who, if the plans go ahead, will no longer be within walking- distance of a library. But then again, maybe they’ll just take away our bus passes.

Perhaps the most powerful thing we can do is to share our stories about what our libraries have done for us; to tell our council, in the words of Philip Pullman, that “YOU don’t know the value of what you are looking after.”

When have they ever needed a witness for anything? The descent into the dark underbelly of the Frewin Undercroft is all too apt an introduction to 1930s Nazi Germany: a world crystallized in the short scenes chosen for this adaptation in an infernal tightrope walk vacillating between peaks of paranoia and punishment. The team have worked hard on this, and demonstrate clear passion on all fronts. The venue has been chosen specifically, to try and reproduce the atmosphere of fear, oppression and censorship that gave rise to the piece in the first place: Everyone is a suspect. In the final production next week this will be further enhanced by the presence of SA guards, who will act as ushers and interfere with audience members, even interrupting the action of the play.

Written between 1933 and 1938 as a piece of counter-propaganda, this is one of Brecht’s most famous openly anti-Nazi plays. Most inspiring about it for anyone who loves theatre however, is probably its phoenix-like capacity for rebirth, of which the company have taken advantage. Ben Martin has furnished a strong adaptation of the piece, containing all its fear and frustrations. Perhaps even more impressive however is Oliver Murphy’s handling of the translation, of which he has done a fine job, with only A-Level German under his belt.

The cast fall out in a military line chanting in unison and experience a hundred deaths between each scene change in this nightmarish phantasmagoria. Over the course of each vignette, we bear silent witness to the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis on peoples’ everyday lives. For those unfamiliar with Brecht, the piece evokes a paranoia and disruption to the average individual in a manner akin to that experienced in The Lives of Others (2006) – though obviously in a much earlier, Nazi Germany. Fear and Misery tells several stories, depicting scenes from the lives of all corners of society, ranging from scientists, fleeing Jewish spouses, to Communist dissidents. A particularly touching vignette is that of The Spy, in which a family are left completely distraught about their actions being continuously monitored from within their own home. A statement such as Hitler’s Germany is not in my vocabulary, or the simplest assertion about the propaganda contained in the newspapers become life-threatening. Their son, a member of Hitler Youth, could be a potential informant, and a five-minute disappearance to buy sweets reduces them to despair, desperately trying to rewrite their history, lest the next knock on the door be that of the police. Through this scene and others, Adam Scott Taylor and Dugie Young offer especially polished performances, which, between whip cracks, will leave you gasping at the edge of your seat. Taylor displays a mastery of fear and pain, delivering blood-curdling screams that even fellow cast members were unable to watch. Young displays a great versatility, moving from the role of a suspected little Judas effortlessly into that of a tyrannical officer. The performance, at its best is utterly gut-wrenching, you are not coming here for mild entertainment.

(Maryam Ahmed)

(Clare Richards)

(Maryam Ahmed)

(Clare Richards)

(Maryam Ahmed)

(Clare Richards)

(Sonali Campion)

(Shaun Thein)

(Shaun Thein)

(Michelle Tan)

(Lauri Saksa)

Chaos as his concubine, what we witness on tonight’s stage is the Word made flesh. The poetical prophet has made his entrance, and he doesn’t need a microphone. “Are you nervous?” he asks as he steps under the spotlight. Well, we should be: Oxford doesn’t know what it’s in for. In a simple grey shirt and beat-up trainers, Saul Williams takes us from the streets of Detroit to Blakian ecstasies, transmogrifying the stuffy surrounds of the Grove Auditorium into an altar of dirty angels heralding a new poetry of which Allen Ginsberg would be proud.

Hailing from Newburgh, New York, it was whilst studying for his Master’s Degree at NYU that Williams first encountered the New York café poetry circuit where he quickly gained popularity, winning the title of Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s Grand Slam Champion in 1996, spring-boarding him to fame. A polymath professor of the University of Life, Williams is more than a mere fountain of Genericanisms and has a lot more to debate than identity politics.

With frankness and ease Williams opens the floor to questions, leaning in past the first row and into the crowd. Rather telling about our audience was a question about when things go wrong, a worry that plagues the minds of most here given the exigences of the University. When asked how he dealt with this, it was refreshing to hear a light mockery of this mentality, stating that there was no need to worry about error, and that it isn’t a “glitch in the Matrix”. The audience received an equal teasing for spelling mistakes in the email to his booking agent. So much for the OED.

To say that you have “seen” or “watched” Williams would be an inadequate choice of verb, as there is nothing passive about the encounter. Perhaps there is something of the preacher in the prophet: I wear my loin cloth over my eyes and ejaculate too soon. Forgive me Father for I have sinned. There is an unashamed nakedness to him, in his frank responses and in the nature of his poems. From the moment Williams takes to the stage, you enter a relationship with him. Together we bear witness to the young, skin-bleaching Black Stacey, then slide to engage with the older, smoother, lithe morning love-making thighs […] parentheses, holding silence and light.

When asked about his creative process, Williams said that writing for him was “like dancing”, an unconscious process – a fact that resonates in the liquid lucidity of the imagery of his poems, taking the spectator from inner space to outer space in one fell swoop: “we unravel our navels that we may ingest the sun” (Coded Language). Williams’s presence is all-encompassing and his poetry seizes all the senses with its velveteen depth and electric contentiousness. We were kept happy under the hypnotism of his tongue all evening – only to have to be told to leave and somehow shake ourselves from the blissful haze.

A great success for the Oxford Poetry Society with more speakers to come later in the term, I can’t wait for their next event.

This year, you will find a variety of films in the Best Motion Picture category, where the pretentious (Black Swan) battles it out with the playful (Toy Story 3), and frustrated lesbian parents (The Kids Are All Right) come up against desperate mountaineers (127 Hours). On the whole, however, a relatively small number of films dominate the spread of categories.

The King’s Speech comes to mind with its 12 nominations and all sorts of smear campaigns about King George VI and his actual likeability are circulating across the media as the envious attempt to knock the British film industry’s pride and joy off its throne.

Following close behind it with 10 nominations is the Coen brothers’ Western remake, True Grit, whose 15 year-old actress Hailee Stanfeld has been nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. When such a young actor or actress receives a nomination in such a hotly contested category, alongside more seasoned performers such as Amy Adams and Melissa Leo who are both nominated for The Fighter, one can never help but wonder if the judges are just impressed that someone so young can put in a half-decent performance. But that is probably unfair because Stanfeld’s performance is actually very strong, her age notwithstanding.

The male supporting actors are in equally hot competition this year: Christian Bale’s powerful performance as a down-and-out former boxer in The Fighter is rivalled by Mark Ruffalo’s nuanced, laid-back interpretation of a Californian sperm donor in The Kids Are All Right and Geoffrey Rush’s engaging speech therapist in The King’s Speech.

Colin Firth is, of course, in the Best Actor category, alongside Javier Bardem for his intense performance in gritty Barcelona-based Biutiful and Jesse Eisenberg for his remarkable incarnation of Mark Zuckerberg in so-so film The Social Network. It is perhaps a surprise not to see Leonard Di Caprio in the running, after his excellent performances in both Nolan’s Inception and Scorsese’s Shutter Island. In fact, Shutter Island has, unfairly, been completely overlooked.

Annette Bening has beaten co-star Julianne Moore to the Best Actress nomination for The Kids Are All Right but her performance in this comedy drama is unlikely to triumph over those of Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine) as we all know that the darker, more miserable parts tend to attract the awards.

The one certainty is that the tearful winners will thank their studios for `making it happen,’ their opponents for losing and their hamsters for sticking with them through it all.

‘The Fighter (blah), that’s like (blah) this year’s The Wrestler (blah)’. Indeed the comparison is inevitable; they are two high profile, Oscar-bait fighting films, helmed by two arthouse directors who were clawing back to the mainstream after two relative box office failures. Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006) was an elegiac and beautiful box office failure, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004) was a quirky, smug and self-aware box office failure.

However, it is this element of smug self-awareness that makes Russell’s The Fighter such a joy to watch, and not what one would expect from the sports-drama-by-numbers trailer for the film. The opening shot pans down to a film crew following former boxer Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) as he makes his way through the streets of his home town. ‘This is the start of my glorious comeback,’ he slurs through his crack-addled face. Dicky seems convinced that he is the star of the show and that his story will be one of a glorious resurrection, the feel good hit of the year. However, Russell’s gritty direction does not let the audience believe this for a second, as he captures the numb and self-destructive element of Dicky’s character with a sympathetic eye devoid of hope.

The obsessive emphasis which Dicky places upon his ‘comeback film’, which we later realise is a documentary about crack addiction, infests the mind of his brother Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), supposedly the film’s actual dramatic epicentre. Micky is convinced that his own film should follow suit, he thinks that he is attempting his own glorious comeback, when the truth is that he is fighting for the right to get started. ‘I’m done fighting, I don’t need it anymore,’ Micky says to his love interest Charlene (Amy Adams). ‘That’s dumb,’ she replies. The film charts Micky’s growth as an individual more than it does his rise as a fighter, as he slowly comes to terms with his right to the role of leading man and decides not to condemn himself to the position of silent witness to his brother’s downfall.

The film’s only major flaw is to be found in the last act, which returns the focus wholly to Wahlberg, and transforms the story into a ‘rise of the underdog’ affair, injecting simplicity into the film as it shies away from the complexity of the relationship between fighter brothers Dicky and Micky. In the sub-plot concerning Dicky’s film, director Russell revels in the post-modern as Micky decides that he now wants to star in a film of his own, which is of course what this has been, and we are invited to view Dicky’s own film, on the other hand, as a joyless parody of The Wrestler. With this in mind, Micky’s wish to separate himself from his self-destructive brother seems to represent Russell’s goal of separating his film from thoughtless and banal Wrestler comparisons.

Mark Wahlberg is on form as the effortlessly charming Micky, whose only fault is caring just too much about everyone in his life, whether they are good for him or not. However, the star of the show was always going to be Christian Bale, whose performance as the deluded and drug-ugly Dicky is Oscar-worthy (and Golden Globe-winning). However, the strength of Bale’s performance leaves one questioning the meaning of the film; Bale’s character Dicky is a man who, albeit questionably, seems to come to terms with having his brother in the spotlight. However, because the emotional strength of the film is always with Bale, this idea is undercut, and he out-acts Wahlberg at almost every juncture.