On June 10, Taylor Swift marked another minor career milestone when her Toy Story 5 song “I Knew It, I Knew You” “closed the panel” at country radio and was immediately added to all 157 stations on the Mediabase Country chart. This has only happened three times before, and never with a female artist. This was especially important since before she released 1989 in 2015, Swift had publicly stated that she was no longer a country artist. Now, she’s pushing to appear on those stations again, and the gatekeepers of the genre have graciously thrown the doors open again. Not only were we reunited with Jessie doll and her owner, but we were also reunited with Taylor and Twan.
We’ll see in 6-9 months if “I Knew It, I Knew You” can close some other panels. That means members of the Motion Picture Academy’s music department will vote to determine the shortlist and final nominations for Best Original Song for the 2027 Oscars, followed by a larger voting block that will determine next year’s Academy Awards. Could a modest-sounding country-pop song finally earn the woman who is perhaps the world’s most popular entertainer an Oscar to go with all her Grammy gold medals? (Co-writer and producer Jack Antonoff’s stuff, too?) Academy members may not have this in mind yet, but half the Swifties of the world do.
Even die-hard fans might not argue that Swift is as premature as, say, Diane Warren from Bridesmaids, who won the Best Song award 17 times. Still, the superstar has been singing movie songs without nominations for 17 years, including “Safe & Sound” (2012’s “The Hunger Games”) and “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” (2012’s “The Hunger Games”). Other strong contenders include “Fifty Shades Darker” (2017), “Beautiful Ghost” (2019’s “Cats”), and “Only the Young” (her 2020 documentary). “Miss Americana”) and “Carolina” (“Where the Crawdads Sing” in 2022). The song “Cats” earned her a Golden Globe nomination, but the closest she came to an Oscar was for the song “Crawdads,” which made it onto the Academy’s 15-song shortlist. The music department thinks they don’t respect celebrities, so there’s no guarantee that having a bona fide blockbuster movie theme will take her further.
But even if you rightly feel that you don’t “owe anything” to Swift, there are other historical oversights that could be corrected by the nomination and ultimate win for “I Knew It.” The Academy has a history of misunderstandings regarding “Toy Story” songs. Without doing any research, can you believe that Randy Newman won awards for both “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” and “When She Loved Me,” two of the greatest movie themes in modern history? (Newman won with “We Belong Together” in Toy Story 3, which felt like a collective admission that, “Yes, we failed before.”)
There’s also the Academy’s shaky history with country music. No country hit has ever actually won an Oscar. (No, Dolly’s “9 to 5″ didn’t chart.) Although it didn’t chart, several songs that would be loosely classified as country made it to the winner’s circle. Tex Ritter’s “Midday Ballad” (also known as “Don’t Foresake Me, Oh My Darling”) in 1952, and Keith Carradine’s fingerpicking “Nashville” song “I’m Easy” in 1975. (If you really wanted to expand, you could also include “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which didn’t make the country charts and BJ Thomas wasn’t considered a country artist until late in his career. You could also include “You Light Up My Life,” which everyone remembers as a pop smash but had some country crossover success.) Now, if the Grammys eschew country in the top category almost every year, you can’t exactly expect C&W tokenization from the Oscars. But if anyone can finally force expression, it’s Swift. She’s underperforming in her natural genre (not really) and just scored her 15th No. 1 on the Hot 100 to prove it.
In the future, it will be easy to see who will be rooting for the most enthusiastically. Oscar telecast producers may hope to secure an additional 1 million viewers if Swift performs and reaction shots are available throughout the night. (Currently, the Academy only selects culturally popular Best Song nominees for television broadcasts, so there may not be any other songs to sing along to…but when the clip is shown, she might stand up and say lines from “The Odyssey” or “The Adventures of Cliff Booth.”)
There are better reasons to do this. That’s good. A folky harmonica and un-Nashville-like saxophone enhance the sweetness of Swift’s lyrics, assuring that love has no bounds in time, space, or alienation. The echoes of Jesse and Bonnie’s front-porch reconciliation are like “Cardigan” and “Betty” for children, for everyone who succumbs to this film’s earned sentiment. And if it can unite the world of music lovers by suddenly becoming universally pro-Swift again after “Wood,” perhaps it’ll be a rapport worth paying off. When was the last time a song made all of us movie fans feel so sweet? Hey, it’s been a while.
