On June 10, Taylor Swift marked another small career milestone when her “Toy Story 5” song “I Knew It, I Knew You” “closed the panel” at country radio, getting instantly added at all 157 stations that report to Mediabase’s country chart — something that’s only occurred three times before, and never for a female artist. It was significant especially because Swift publicly declared herself no longer a country artist prior to releasing “1989” in 2015. Now she was pushing to get on those stations again, and genre gatekeepers cheerfully reopened the door. We didn’t just get a reunion between the Jessie doll and her owner … we got one between Taylor and twang.
In six to nine months, we’ll see whether “I Knew It, I Knew You” can close a couple other panels. Namely, the Motion Picture Academy’s music branch, whose members will vote for a best original song shortlist and final nominations going into the 2027 Oscars, followed by the bigger voting bloc that will decide next year’s Academy Awards. Can a humble-sounding country-pop tune finally give the woman who is arguably the world’s most popular entertainer an Oscar to go with all her Grammy gold? (Along with one for co-writer-producer Jack Antonoff?) Academy members may not have this front of mind yet, but half the Swifties in the world do.
Even hardcore fans might not argue that Swift is as overdue as, say, 17-time best-song bridesmaid Diane Warren. Still, the superstar has been doing film songs going back 17 years without a nomination, including such seemingly viable contenders as “Safe & Sound” (2012’s “The Hunger Games”), “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” (2017’s “Fifty Shades Darker”), “Beautiful Ghosts” (2019’s “Cats”), “Only the Young” (her 2020 doc “Miss Americana”) and “Carolina” (2022’s “Where the Crawdads Sing”). While the “Cats” song got a Golden Globe nomination, the closest she’s come to advancing toward an Oscar was the “Crawdads” tune making it onto the Academy’s 15-song shortlist. The music branch thinks of itself as no respecter of celebrity, so there are no guarantees that having a movie theme that’s a bona fide smash will get her further.
But even if you rightfully feel that Swift isn’t “owed,” there are other historic oversights a nomination and ultimate win for “I Knew It” could redress. The Academy has a history of getting it wrong with “Toy Story” songs: Would you believe, without looking it up, that Randy Newman won for neither “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” nor “When She Loved Me,” two of the greatest movie themes in modern history? (Newman did win for “Toy Story 3’s” “We Belong Together,” which felt like a collective admission of “Yep, we blew it before.”)
Then there is the Academy’s wobbly history with country music. There has never been an actual country hit that has won an Oscar. (Nope, Dolly’s “9 to 5” didn’t make it.) A couple songs that never charted but would loosely qualify as country did reach the winner’s circle: the Tex Ritter-sung “Ballad of High Noon” (aka “Do Not Foresake Me, Oh My Darling”) in ’52, and Keith Carradine’s finger-picking “Nashville” song “I’m Easy” in ’75. (If you really want to stretch it, you could include “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” though it never made a country chart and BJ Thomas wasn’t considered a country artist till later in his career, and “You Light Up My Life,” which everyone remembers as a pop smash but did have some country crossover success.) Now, if the Grammys shun country in top categories pretty much every year, we can’t exactly expect any C&W tokenism out of the Oscars. But if anybody could finally force representation, it’s Swift, slumming (not really) in her native genre — and having just earned her 15th No. 1 on the Hot 100 to show for it.
Down the road, it’s easy to see who’ll root hardest: Oscar telecast producers, who might wish they could put fingers on the scale to ensure an extra million viewers if Swift performs and is available for reaction shots all night. (There might not be any other songs to sing along with, now that the Academy is only letting the most culturally ubiquitous best song nominees onto the telecast… but when clips are being shown, maybe she could stand up and mouth the dialogue of “The Odyssey” or “The Adventures of Cliff Booth.”)
There’s a better reason to have it in the running: It’s good. The folksy harmonica and not-so-Nashville saxophone bolster the sweetness of a Swift lyric assuring us there’s no gulf of time, space or estrangement love can’t close. Its echoing of Jessie’s and Bonnie’s front-porcj reconciliation is like “Cardigan” or “Betty” for children, which is to say, everyone who succumbs to the film’s well-earned sentiment. And if it can unite the world of music lovers in suddenly being universally pro-Swift again after “Wood,” maybe that’s a rapprochement worth rewarding. When did a song last make us moviegoers all feel this sweet? Man, it’s been a while.
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