Comparing An Object To A String Literal?

This might just be a matter of taste, but I'm wondering if there's a "recommended" way to compare a variable of type Object (which might be Nothing or have a different dynamic type than String) to a string literal in VB.NET. The following options obviously won't work:

If myObject = "Hello World" Then ... -- won't compile
If myObject Is "Hello World" Then ... -- tests for reference equality, which is just wrong
If myObject.Equals("Hello World") Then ... -- throws an exception if myObject is Nothing
If DirectCast(myObject, String) = "Hello World" Then ... -- throws an exception if myObject is not a string

Thus, the only (simple, single-expression) solution I could find is to use

If "Hello World".Equals(myObject) Then ...

which looks a bit clumsy to me. Did I miss any obvious alternative, other than doing type checks or explicit checks for Nothing?(Of course, we're talking about Option Strict On.)