2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it really had been Rob Schneider. Preferably in both roles.

Roman Polanski’s The Ghost won five of the seven European Film Awards it was nominated for last night. It was a display of the sort of sentimental herd mentality familiar from the Oscars which the European Film Academy’s voters like to feel they are better than. Polanski himself loomed from the big screen via Skype, kept from the ceremony in Estonia’s capital by the US arrest warrant which was surely the reason for the Academy’s largesse. The director looked down on the spectacle from his book-lined study with an unlined, unmoving face, detached by more than geography, a man who had seen much better and worse in his time.

"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?

The Arts Desk has been in two minds about Mercury Award winners The xx, who picked up the £20,000 cheque last night. Joe Muggs loved them, Bruce Dessau was sceptical. Singer and bass player Oliver Sim told the audience at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London that they weren't expecting to win.

Could Peter Carey possibly become the first author to win the Booker three times? Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) both previously won him the most prestigious and hotly contended literary gong this side of the Atlantic (and south of Stockholm). The judges, led by Andrew Motion, have whittled the long list of 13 down to the final half-dozen, and Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is among them.

In a terrific year for comedy at the Fringe, the winners of the 2010 Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards (formerly the Perriers) are Russell Kane, Roisin Conaty and Bo Burnham. The prizes - cheques for £10,000, £5,000 and £5,000 - were presented to the three comedians on Saturday in the Spiegel Tent in George Square in a celebration of 30 years of these awards.

“There is a tradition of photographing people with Down’s syndrome, but not of positive, strong images of people staring back at you, challenging you to look at them. This exhibition reverses that. The images we produce are not sympathetic or sentimental, but strong and covering all aspects of life, and using contemporary photography to get our message across. We’ve turned the camera 180 degrees and now the former subjects are in control.”

“We all come from the same DNA, as Desmond Tutu is always reminding us, and we shouldn’t be surprised that these musical collaborations take place - and work so well.” That was Peter Gabriel's comment on the music at WOMAD last weekend, a festival he co-founded in 1981, now crammed with more and more bands revealing obvious genetic connections.“