Johnny Depp has become one of the most popular and beloved actors of his generation thanks to his versatility and the variety of movies he has starred in, of which some have earned him nominations to some of the most important awards in the industry, as are the Academy Awards – and yet, he hasn’t won an Oscar yet. Johnny Depp’s career started with a bang as he was cast as Glen Lantz in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. The following year, he starred in the comedy Private Resort and made his TV debut in one episode of the detective series Lady Blue.
Depp had a minor role in Oliver Stone’s Platoon before landing the lead role in the police procedural TV series 21 Jump Street, which established him as a teen idol. Although the series made him a widely known name in the industry, he wasn’t comfortable with the experience of being a teen idol and started choosing roles based on interest rather than box office success. This led him to star in movies like John Waters’ Cry-Baby, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, and the coming-of-age drama What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and he started getting nominations for different awards.
Depp continued taking part in a variety of projects and his collaborations with Tim Burton became more frequent and popular, but his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was a turning point in his career. Pirates of the Caribbean was a major box office success and gave Depp his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 2004, followed by a second one the next year for his role as J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland, and another one in 2008 for his performance as Sweeney Todd in Tim Burton’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. However, Depp didn’t win the Oscar on any of those occasions and hasn’t been nominated again, leading viewers to wonder why he hasn’t won an Oscar yet, and there are different reasons for that.
First off, it’s important to take a look at his fellow nominees and the actors who took the Oscar on those occasions: Sean Penn for Mystic River, Jamie Foxx for Ray, and Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood, all of them drama movies and some of them biographical ones, which are genres that the Academy always turns its attention to. It’s no secret that the Academy favors certain genres and types of stories, especially over those more popular with the audience, and in Johnny Depp’s case, the movies he has been nominated for (except, maybe, for Finding Neverland) have been among those that the Academy tends to overlook, so it’s not really about Depp’s talent not being “at the level” of winning an Oscar. Since Sweeney Todd, Depp has continued to take part in all types of movies that wouldn’t even be considered by the Academy, and in some cases, his acting wasn’t deserving of a nomination (as happened with, for example, Dark Shadows and Mortdecai).
It’s also worth noting that Depp isn’t interested in winning an Oscar, and he’s more focused on taking the roles he wants and likes. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2015, Depp shared he doesn’t “want to win one of those things ever”, saying that he doesn’t want to have to talk and that the idea of winning means that “you’re in competition with someone” and he’s “not in competition with anybody”. Criticism towards the Academy and its criteria grows more and more each year, and while his fans would like to see him hold the golden statue someday, Johnny Depp prefers to focus his attention and energy on taking the roles he likes.