With an apparently straight face, MCN’s David Poland has stated that Interstellar‘s Matthew McConaughey has a shot (i.e., “not so long a shot”) at being nominated for Best Actor. What is it about the words “forget it” that Poland doesn’t understand? Love Is Strange‘s John Lithgow has a better shot at being nominated than McConaughey. People just want McConaughey to back off. The more he weeps about missing his children in Interstellar, the worse it’ll be. Zip it.

But Poland is just getting warmed up. His next statement comes close to dismissing this aspect of the Oscar tea-leaf perceptions of In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “I don’t buy into the idea — at all — that there are four locked places in Best Actor,” Poland says. “That doesn’t mean that I think that four of the current five frontrunners won’t end up making it,” he explains. “That could well happen. But the only actor I consider cemented into a nomination is Michael Keaton. Great performance, great story, super-strong movie. In.

“After that, there is a lot of assumption and not a lot of solid evidence of lockdom. And I am a fan, personally, of the performances of Cumberbatch, Redmayne, Carrell and Spall. But we really don’t know how these movies will settle in with Academy voters. They feel like good fits…as do the movies they are in. But we have a long way to go, even if we have a short time to get there.” And like Tapley, Poland doesn’t even mention Tom Hardy (The Drop, Locke) as a dark horse.