The odds-on favorite to win Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars tonight is Django Unchained. If and when Quentin Tarantino bounds to the stage, he will be handed his second such trophy by a 25-year-old UCLA Master’s film student for whom the “M” is silent.

Tatenda Mbudzi (last name pronounced “Budzi”) is one of six lucky film students replacing the traditional trophy models of shows past. In addition to Best Original Screenplay, he is scheduled to hand out hardware for Best Visual Effects, Best Documentary Feature and Best Supporting Actress.

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The funniest reaction to that UK Channel 4 set-to-go-viral press junket interview conducted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy (pictured) with Quentin Tarantino is from the interviewer himself. Via blog post-mortem, the reporter deems himself rather disappointed with the level of QT’s first wave of put-down dialogue:

Tarantino has made at least two of my all time favorite movies. I can quote speeches from Pulp Fiction on a good day and watch Kill Bill Vol 2 on a late night anytime. So I have to admit “I’m shutting your butt down!” was a slight disappointment from the creator of some of the most exciting dialogue of modern movies…

For those concerned about my “butt” it is just fine. My cycling training for the big London to Paris ride with Jon is causing it more pain than Quentin. And he didn’t storm out at the end, in case you’re wondering. Though we didn’t exchange mobile numbers.

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The “D” in Drudge Report was anything but silent this past Wednesday for The Hollywood Reporter. As Max Read on Gawker, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic and other media watchers noted, Drudge went crazy with a 40-point, multiple N-word headline pointing to Todd McCarthy‘s Django Unchained review.

Having here at FishbowlLA had a brush or two with the dynamite known as a Drudge mention, we were curious how much traffic – exactly - the item in question received December 12. A spokesperson for THR tells us McCarthy’s Django review registered an astounding 1,000,137 page views.

Drudge often links to McCarthy THR critiques, and not every one of those Wednesday clicks came from his site. But for McCarthy to cross the single-day one million mark a day before being co-opted for an Onion item about The Hobbit, well that’s too cool even for Quentin Tarantino school.

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It’s remarkable how much traction some early-retirement comments initially made by Quentin Tarantino in his Playboy interview with Deadline.com’s Mike Fleming continue to receive. Hundreds of pick-ups later, those intentions are a topic of conversation once more in the latest Hollywood Reporter awards season roundtable discussion.

The funny thing is that Tarantino indirectly challenges his whole assertion of not wanting to become a diminishing-cinematic-returns old fart when he reminds that his favorite film of 2011 was made by a 76-year-old (now 77) Woody Allen. Fellow panelist David O. Russell for one would like QT to keep at it:

Russell: Back to Quentin, about his whole thing about the young man’s game. First of all, I’m gonna try to convince you to keep making movies ’cause I love watching your movies. Second of all, I remember saying to Diane Keaton about 10 years ago, “What is it with Woody Allen?” I felt like his work had gotten shaky. And she said: “I don’t know. I don’t know how many times he can go back to that well.” But the fact that Woody Allen, every year, gets up and makes a movie, I think that’s a good way to live, and he hits a good average sometimes. I really loved Midnight in Paris.

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At age 69, New Yorker film critic David Denby owns at least two marks of modern media distinction. He is not on Twitter, and he still gets to mete out erudite, long-form print media movie critiques. A collection of his magazine essays spanning 1999 to 2011 make up his latest book Do the Movies Have a Future?, out next week from Simon & Schuster.

At the New Yorker, Denby famously alternates on the cinematic beat with Cambridge, UK based professor Anthony Lane. Part Six of the book is also about “Two Critics” – iconic predecessors James Agee and Pauline Kael. In the piece about Kael (an amalgamation of 2001 and 2003 articles), Denby recalls how she delivered a death blow in the early 1970s via telephone, informing him that he was simply not cut out to be a film critic.

“I was a graduate student in California going nowhere fast,” Denby tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “And if Pauline Kael hadn’t taken an interest in me – and she took an interest in many, many people, particularly young people – I probably would have become a professor of film, which is of course not bad. But this has been a lot more fun.”

“When she said, ‘This is not really for you,’ of course it was a blow and I was very upset,” he continues. “But she wound up hurting my feelings and not my career. In fact, in some ways it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because if I had stayed within that circle, I don’t think I would have ever grown up. She was so powerful that you wanted her approval. Internally, you conformed to her opinions… It was sort of like, ‘What would Pauline think?’ And I think that’s a bad habit for anyone to get into, particularly a critic. So in a way, by being kicked out, I was forced to be my own man.”

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When Quentin Tarantino was doing press for Inglorious Basterds, he was asked by a reporter what films or filmmaker would inspire him today if he was just starting out in the business. He answered Paul Thomas Anderson, writer-director of The Master, opening Friday in LA and New York:

“We’re really good friends and we have a very kind of artist romantic relationship. I feel I’m Marlon Brando to his Montgomery Clift. But there is a reality. Brando was better because Clift was out there. Same thing, Clift was better because he knew f*ckin’ Brando was already there, all right?”

In Anderson’s The Master, Joaquin Phoenix is one part Brando and four parts Clift. The actor’s colossal portrayal of Freddie Quell, a man who quite literally is fighting at every moment to quell his personal demons, ranks as the first performance in a very long time to recall the on-screen syncopated beats and off-screen tortured genius of an actor who had his own fair share of namesake films (The Search, The Heiress, The Defector).

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Based on reports coming out of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival sneak peak at Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, it’s going to be a very schizophrenic Christmas at the movies for perennial Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio.

Arriving in theaters December 25 together with Baz Luhrmann’s remake of The Great Gatsby will be a DiCaprio we’ve never seen or heard before. Per Kyle Buchanan’s Vulture dispatch on the seven minutes of footage shown:

The big surprise? How funny this potentially controversial Western has turned out to be. In particular, Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be having the time of his life dropping N-bombs and smiling rotted teeth as plantation owner Calvin Candie, whom freed slave Jamie Foxx and bounty hunter Christoph Waltz must defeat in order to save Foxx’s wife Kerry Washington.

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Although Mike Fleming’s deadline.com duties keep him very busy, he still finds the time to continue one longstanding freelance tradition. The Playboy interview.

Beginning with Robert Downey Jr. in the 1990s, Fleming has contributed around two dozen centerpiece Q&As to the publication, chatting with everyone from Denzel Washington to Harrison Ford to Quentin Tarantino. For the June issue, the A-lister across the tape recorder is Tom Cruise. Towards the end of the conversation, Fleming asks Cruise what he learned from that whole Matt Lauer-Oprah Winfrey train wreck:

“When I go back and look at it, I find myself thinking, I don’t feel that way. I get how it came across, but I don’t feel that way, and I never have. Telling people how to live their lives? I saw how that came across and how pieces were edited.”

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Should an establishment coming to the heart of an upstanding SoCal community be allowed to call itself Bastards? Even if the name is inspired by the “Magnificent Bastards” nickname of a 2nd Battaltion 4th Marines infantry unit?

Eric Pierce, a blogger for the Downey Patriot, revisits that topic today in light of Thursday’s official statement from the city about the imminent arrival of the B-named sports bar. It would seem that this will remain a contentious issue, as Downey has decreed that it cannot force owner Nick Velez to change the shingle. Per Pierce:

This newspaper has published several letters on the subject and this week we even received a petition signed by more than 20 local residents in opposition to the Bastards name.

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FishbowlLA was in attendance Thursday as Whitewater Films kicked off its third year of bi-monthly back patio panels in Santa Monica with a sunny lunch hour discussion of “The Shifting Landscape of Independent Film.” Manning the barbecue as usual was company founder Rick Rosenthal, while Indiewire editor-in-chief Dana Harris returned for another rotating stint as panel moderator.

Dustin Smith, vp of acquisitions and business affairs for Roadside Attractions, kept things lively with a number of jokes and direct exchanges with the other panelists. He recalled for example that by flying in Jennifer Lawrence from London for a Q&A, he was able to keep Winter’s Bone screening at the Arclight Cinemas Hollywood for a critical early third week. He also had lots to say about the state of “S-VOD” dealmaking with Netlifx; as the streaming service focuses more on episodic TV assets, he recently encountered his first outright rights renewal rejection (Goodbye Solo).

Deborah McIntosh, a member of William Morris Endeavor’s global finance and distribution group, addressed the exciting new distribution arm of client Tim League, co-founder of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse. She also touched on the agency’s imminent plans to release an independent feature exclusively on Facebook.

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