Sideshow: Katy Perry, Paul McCartney, Tarantino

"I love her," Katy Perry tells Sirius XM of pop newbie Ariana Grande, who this year hit the jackpot with her debut LP, Yours Truly. "I think she has the best female vocal in pop music today. . . . She has literally the best voice, the best voice live. She kills it. She's so good."

Katy says she's become gal-pals with another unknown artist. "I actually just became friends with a fantastic woman named Stevie Nicks," says Katy. Never heard of her. "She is a beautiful woman, and I hope to have tea with her in London. She just has so many little nuggets of wisdom and, you know, kind of sees straight through my soul."

Paul McCartney tells Britain's Sky News he let his daughter Beatrice, 10, watch Miley Cyrus twerking. "I watched it as an experiment to check, but you look at it and you say, 'What's everyone shouting about?' I think it was only mildly shocking . . . it wasn't explicit at all."

Quentin Tarantino didn't just direct Jamie Foxx in the neo-post-revisionary western Django Unchained. He also schooled him in the art of directing. "He's taught me how to shoot, how to take my time shooting with one camera, how to make it lean. I learned a lot," Foxx tells Men's Fitness mag. Foxx wants to put it to good use and helm a picture. "I don't want to die and not have all of the ideas that I want to do out," he says.

Foxx still loves the thespianic craft, insisting his role as Electro in the next Spider-Man pic is a meaty one. "It is an acting piece," he says. "A lot of people think it's just a superhero thing." Really?

Foxx may start his directing career making home movies with his (alleged) latest paramour! "Multiple Sources confirm" that Foxx, 45, is dating Tom Cruise survivor Katie Holmes, 34, In Touch Weekly proclaims! He's secretly spent secret time at Katie's pad under the cloak of secrecy, says the mag.

Exult, Kiwis everywhere! New Zealand's Eleanor Catton, 28, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction, for her sprawling epic The Luminaries. She gets £50,000 (about $79,615 ). She's the second Kiwi to win, she's the youngest winner, her book's the longest, and she beat out competition such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Colm Tóibín.

Local heroine Tina Fey and Parks and Recreation's Amy Poehler will cohost the 71st and 72d Golden Globe Awards in 2014 and 2015. That is, if the nation hasn't been sold to a chop shop for parts by that time. . . . Former Dancing With the Stars pro Edyta Sliwinska, 32, tells People she and hub Alec Mazo are expecting a boy in January. . . . B-ball player Kris Humphries auctioned off the engagement ring he gave Kim Kardashian for $749,000, says the New York Daily News. It was valued at $2 mil when Kris first acquired it. Guess loss of love decreases dollar value, too.