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The Oscars are upon us this weekend, though in more ways than one, and each is likely to remind us of the power of story. First, the Academy Awards will celebrate some of the most compelling enactments from the last 12 months of cinema. “Stories are equipment for living,” says the Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee, who believes that we go to the movies because we hope to find in someone else’s story something that will help us to understand our own. But then, come Monday morning, the spotlight shifts from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to a courthouse in Pretoria when the Oscars plural narrow to the singularly absorbing story of one Oscar Pistorius, who begins his trial for murder. There will be a film of this one day, too - Ryan Gosling is already rumoured to be lined up to star in it - but for now, even though many of us will feel uncomfortably voyeuristic at the thought of watching such ‘real life’ unfold in televised sequences from a courtroom, we’re likely to be glued to them anyway. As the writer John Eldredge puts it, “When we turn on the news, we are tuning in not just to a world of facts, but to a world of stories.” And this is a big one. The wounded hero. The beauty and brokenness of the human body and spirit. Love, shattered one terrible Valentine’s night. We were already captivated, cheering the Blade Runner on at the London Olympics, before that awful twist in the plot. Life, of course, is not a movie - and we don’t need reminding that people have suffered terribly in the Pistorius case. But still, if we hope to find something for ourself within the more cinematic scope of others, whether fact or fiction, then perhaps it’s because ours alone is never quite the full story. Trying to understand it in isolation is like walking into a movie 40 minutes late, and wondering what the confused mix of beauty and tragedy is really all about. “What sort of tale have I fallen into?” wonders the hobbit Sam to his friend Frodo in one of the epic films of our time, Lord of the Rings. What sort of tale indeed? It’s a good and deeply spiritual question, echoing a cultural instinct that we each have a part to play in a story beyond ourselves, and which the Bible tackles through narratives of its own; Jesus told parables to help his followers find their place within the kingdom of God. But whatever we believe, and even if we don’t always see the bigger picture, life is surely less a problem to be solved than a story we must share. And whether through those epic films, or the way we report our news, or yes, through the old, old stories of faith which take us all the way back to “In the beginning”, there are lines to be written yet.