Nobody could deny Matthew Mcconaughey the Oscar for best actor at the 86th Academy Awards. His acceptance speech was typically McConaughey and the 44-year-old Texan really has established himself as one of America's finest actors with movie-stealing turns in Killer Joe, Mud, The Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Club - not to mention his probable Golden Globe and Emmy winning turn in HBO's crime-drama True Detective.

Interstellar

Now, a lot can happen between now and the Oscars in 2015, though McConaughey will be considered an early favorite to win best actor again - for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. It's been known for years that the Academy doesn't particular reward sci-fi, but with Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity winning seven gongs on Sunday (March 2, 2014), it's not difficult to argue that trends are changing. 

Also, it's a common fallacy that Nolan is ignored by the Academy. In fact, his last non-Batman movie, Inception, was nominated for eight Oscars and won four of them.

Interstellar is primed for an Oscar-bait release date of November 7, 2014, and all the signs suggest this one could be big. It's got a long history, which began in June 2006 when Paramount Pictures and filmmaker Steven Spielberg announced plans for a science fiction movie about a theoretical physicist. By March 2007, Christopher's brother Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay and Interstellar remained in development for several years.

By January 2013, Nolan had begun negotiations to Paramount and Warner Bros to direct the movie though by August, Legendary Pictures was in talks to finalize an agreement with Warner Bros to finance "25 per cent or more" of the Interstellar production. The studio reportedly chose to forego financing the Superman movie Man of Steel in exchange for the stake in Interstellar.

The casting of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway came shortly afterwards, while an impressive supporting cast of Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Casey Affleck and John Lithgow was formed. 

Watch the 'Interstellar' trailer:

Though the plot has been kept largely under wraps, we know that Interstellar will focus on the discovery of a wormhole which can connect widely-separated regions of space-time. A team of explorers and scientists embark on a voyage through it to transcend previous limitations on human space travel. 

"Here's what I can tell you," McConaughey said about Interstellar during an interview with Variety, "It's the most ambitious thing he's ever done. And he's done some ambitious stuff."

McConaughey is an actor at the top of his game and he will undoubtedly have numerous chances to join an elite group including Tom Hanks and Sean Penn who have won two Best Actor Oscars. He's also signed on to play a suicidal man who discovers a different path in director Gus Van Sant's Sea of Trees. Watch out for that one, too.

Watch our interview with Matthew McConaughey: