Oscar Seasoning: Taylor Swift Wants it Bad

Is anyone surprised that Toy Story 5 had a massive opening weekend? Well, I am a bit shocked to see that it hit a franchise high, if only because reviews have been far more mixed for this one than any other movie in the series. We always complain about there being too many sequels in cinemas, but lo and behold, they’re the things making money.

Toy Story usually has pretty good songs. Randy Newman, one of the most important and influential songwriters alive, penned the lion’s share of their most memorable tracks, while Sarah MacLachlan made us all cry with Jessie’s ode to Emily. Now joining the pack is Taylor Swift with “I Knew It, I Knew You.” It’s a fine little song, not quite on the level of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” (which Newman DIDN’T win an Oscar for?!), but it’s a number one hit, and Taylor’s got her fans scrambling to buy all the variants. We’ve got about nine months before the 2027 Oscars, but we have a Best Original Song frontrunner.

I don’t think it’s a hot take to note that Swift is hyper-ambitious and has wanted an Oscar for a while. She’s written plenty of songs for movies and campaigned rigorously to get them nominated without success. Now, she’s in her imperial era, where she could release a Notes App recording of herself listening to ambient noise and it’d get five stars from Rolling Stone and sell a million copies. This new a song certainly has far more press around it than her predecessors. Her team is hard at work selling her as a winner in waiting.

I’m a Swift sceptic who’s long been fascinated and kind of bummed out by her “movie” career. Her acting isn’t great (remember when she was in a film directed by notorious bully and creep David O. Russell?), but it’s her interest in instantly becoming a filmmaker that proves more curious to me. Remember when her 10-minute “All Too Well” music video earned her a spot on Variety’s Directors on Directors show, as well as a lavish TIFF event? I was in Toronto when that happened and we were baffled (I also got caught in a scrum of Swifties, and it was scary. There were so many of them outside the Lightbox!) Then she landed a deal with Searchlight for a future movie. Huh. It seemed that she’d instantly had every door in Hollywood opened to her, which isn’t surprising given her mega-fame, but the accompanying crowning of auteurism was. Again, why was she talking to multi-award-winning director and playwright Martin McDonagh about her career behind the camera? What was her experience?

At the risk of being murdered by Swifties, I must admit that this is one reason I’ve long held Swift at arm’s length: every development of her career is accompanied by a lavish PR blitz that heralds her as the first, the best, and the most worthy of that field. It’s not enough for her to finally make a political stance and support LGBTQ+ rights; she has to immediately become queen of the allies with a bad song. The way she coincidentally drops multiple variants of albums and songs when another woman has a chance at hitting the number one spot is, to me, rather pointed. We just saw it with this song and Olivia Rodrigo. It makes Swift seem like she’s threatened by the competition in ways that she never is with men (and also I just resent the whole model of releasing tons of variants to juice your numbers. Yes, I know they all do it, but Swift does it to a ridiculous degree that makes it feel as though she doesn’t believe her music can stand on its own two feet.)

So, of course she’s hungry for an Oscar, and of course all of the press around this song has been about how it will most certainly net her, at the very least, a nomination. In fairness to her, no big-name musician does a song for a movie without the thought of Oscars entering their mind. Bono didn’t do it for his health!

I like shameless Oscar thirst, to a degree. I prefer it when the artist is open about the campaigning process and their own ambition. When Amanda Seyfried talked about this earlier this year, I was thrilled by her candour. What I have less patience for is the sneaky version, where the candidate is shaking all the hands and attending all the parties but puts on an air of faux-humility. Oh, you don’t care about the nomination? Then why are you fighting so hard to get it? The Academy has a weird attitude on this: they want them to pander to them, but they think it’s gauche to admit you want to win.

The Best Original Song category is a controversial one. It’s considered easy to game but is also an endless cycle of end-credits dirges by the same handful of performers. Diane Warren keeps getting nominated, despite a solid decade of unlistenable songs from the most random movies, because she’s in with the music branch, which is small and tight-knit, and they don’t like to go outside of their comfort zones. A lot of Academy members just don’t vote in this category because they have little interest in the noms.

We don’t get many movies with breakout original songs these days. It used to be common for any reasonably mainstream film to have an accompanying song, often by a popular artist but frequently by someone who wrote movie songs for a living. We used to have entire albums of music featured in and inspired by the motion picture. We also just used to make a lot more movie musicals. So, for a solid part of this century, you could find yourself on the Best Original Song longlist with little competition. It’s often been joked that it was one of the easier categories to land a nomination in. Songs like “Shallow” and “Golden” are the exception these days, not the rule. And long gone are the days of Cole Porter.

Swift can easily get the nomination for this song. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t have a ton of competition right now. There are the songs of La Bola Negra, which was a big hit at Cannes, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s doing new songs for the live-action Moana. I assume the new Hunger Games will have an original song. But if this is a category where being a big name helps you with voters, being the biggest name will obviously be good for Swift. The Academy will want her at the ceremony to perform. And Diane Warren will sulk once more (which I’m totally fine with!)

Ideally, I’d like more of a fight because it’s always more fun when there’s a real competition at play rather than one person sweeping the season without fail. Maybe LMM could net the final part of the PEGOT with his new Moana song? I really do think Disney regrets not putting “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” forward for the longlist in Encanto’s year. Surprises are always more intriguing to me. Who knows, maybe there’s something down the line of the release calendar that’ll be 2026’s KPop Demon Hunters. Perhaps Dune Part 3 has an unexpected banger on its soundtrack. Taylor vs. Sandworm.