Commenter Sassy requested we write a Johnny Depp post, and she got my hopes up that Johnny had been officially cast as The Riddler for the third Christopher Nolan-helmed Batman movie. Nothing has been announced though! Last year, there was a lot of coverage of those rumors - many sources had Depp cast as The Riddler, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin. The speculation got so intense, even Johnny had to come out and say that no one had spoken to him about the role, but that he would love to do it. At Comic-Con, Gary Oldman (Gordon in the Batman series) told the crowd that the next Batman would be filming next year, and would be released in 2011. Oldman did not make any confirmations on casting though - but they still have time, so I’m not worried. I think Johnny’s got a pretty good shot at it.

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While looking up that information, I did find two cool little Depp stories. According to The Bosh’s sources, Johnny is looking to enroll his kids in school in England, not France or America. It seems Johnny has purchased a mansion in Bath, England, and he’s been visiting the schools in the area. One of the school’s spokepeople told The Bosh, “As yet, he hasn’t enrolled his children and I believe he is looking at other schools. If he is thinking of us for September, he’d better be quick as the school is filling up fast for the new term, particularly with overseas students. We’ve seen a real jump in students from overseas.” I have no idea where the Paradis-Depp children go to school now - I would imagine that family is as nomadic as the Jolie-Pitts, so my guess is that there are private tutors involved.

Meanwhile, it looks like one of Johnny’s upcoming projects is the oft-rumored Dark Shadows, which was a cult supernatural drama in the 1960s. It had ghosts, werewolves, monsters, witches and a vampire named Barnabas Collins. Guess who Johnny is playing? The blood-sucker himself! But now the Los Angeles Times has a warning for Johnny - vampires are cursed in Hollywood… if you want to win awards, that it.

Is Johnny Depp driving a stake through his hope to win an Oscar someday? The three-time loser (”Sweeney Todd,” “Finding Neverland,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl”) and Oscarless director Tim Burton are aiming to bring cult drama “Dark Shadows” back from the dead.

Don’t they know that vampire tales are cursed in Hollywood? Oscar voters didn’t nominate Bela Lugosi for “Dracula” and Emmy voters recently — and shockingly — snubbed Anna Paquin in “True Blood” just as they had Sarah Michele Gellar in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Maybe Johnny has false hope because he starred in “Ed Wood” with Martin Landau, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor while stumbling around on screen in a vampire cape. Memo to Johnny: Landau wasn’t pretending to be a real vampire as you’ll do when assuming the role of 175-year-old blood-sucker Barnabas Collins. Landau played Bela Lugosi in later years as a pathetic Hollywood has-been hooked on morphine.

But maybe “Dark Shadows” could break the curse of the vampires at showbiz awards, after all. Joan Bennett got nominated for her performance as a grande matriarch in the daytime TV soap version in 1968. She lost, but she got nominated!

Johnny Depp watched the highly addictive Gothic soap at home as a kid, “I was obsessed with Barnabas Collins,” he admits. “I have photographs of me holding Barnabas Collins posters when I was five or six.”

Depp and Burton are busy now gearing up to unveil “Alice in Wonderland,” but Burton assures the L.A. Times that they’ll team up for a feature film version of “Dark Shadows” in the future.

“That’s the plan,” Burton says. “There was something very weird about that, it had the weirdest vibe to it. I’m sort of intrigued about that vibe.”