Taylor Swift Is Missing One Ingredient from the Recipe for a Best Original Song Oscar Frontrunner

Both "Toy Story 5" and its Taylor Swift song are currently topping the charts, but the Academy's Music Branch is picky about how Best Original Song contenders are used in the actual film.

[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Toy Story 5.”]

A couple of major boxes have already been checked. As of Monday, June 22, “Toy Story 5” sits at the top of the box office, with the highest-grossing opening weekend of the year so far. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift‘s hit song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” from the Pixar film’s soundtrack, sits atop the Billboard Hot 100. Many of the ingredients needed to become the surefire favorite for Best Original Song are in place. But having seen the film, there is one outstanding component that, so far, is preventing the song from being the home run Oscar frontrunner it’s being painted as.

Taking a step back, though Randy Newman’s Oscar-nominated song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” serves as the foundation for all the Pixar franchise’s music, the most memorable intertwining of music and visuals in the “Toy Story” films is cowgirl Jessie’s montage in “Toy Story 2” soundtracked to “When She Loved Me,” again written by Newman, and performed by Sarah McLachlan. 

When I went to see “Toy Story 5,” knowing Swift’s song was titled “I Knew It, I Knew You,” and watching the film and how centered it was upon Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack), made me feel certain there would be a callback to that tear-jerking scene featuring Jessie’s last real spotlight. And spoiler alert: There was! Jessie had come back to the house of her original owner, whom she’d felt had abandoned her, and discovered that the owner had named her daughter after her. She knew it. She made a difference in that young girl’s life.

But that scene is not a montage. We do not hear Swift’s song soundtrack that scene, or any scene really. Instead, “I Knew It, I Knew You” plays over the end credits of “Toy Story 5.”

Post-credits songs are a lightning-rod topic among Academy members. To wit, one of the newest Oscar rule changes states that for a post-credits number to be eligible for Best Original Song, they need to play over at least the film’s last 15 seconds before the credits begin. To clarify, though, everyone I’ve spoken to so far who’s involved in the “Toy Story 5” Oscar campaign isn’t worried about whether “I Knew It, I Knew You” will be eligible.

Right now, it should be a frontrunner. Its lyrics speak well to the film audiences just finished watching, and musically, it has a bouncy simplicity similar to “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” making it seem timeless — at least within the confines of Swift’s oeuvre. It’s a standout among the many songs the Grammy winner has written and produced with Jack Antonoff.

But the Academy’s Music Branch, which votes on what submissions will be nominated for Best Original Song, has a preference for songs that factor more heavily into the film’s narrative. “Golden” is the song that helps the “KPop Demon Hunters” finally seal the Honmoon. The first live performance of “Shallow” is the moment that, indeed, “A Star Is Born.” “What Was I Made for?” reflects a real question that “Barbie” finally answers by the emotional climax.

Funny enough, Swift has long proven she’s capable of songs that feature more bluntly in the movie itself. Plenty of zillennial-aged Disney fans would’ve given her an Oscar nomination for writing “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home,” the finale song of “Hannah Montana: The Movie,” performed in concert by Miley Cyrus as the fictional singer, delightfully tying a neat bow on the narrative viewers just watched.

As a performer, her first venture into music for film was “Safe and Sound” (featuring The Civil Wars) from “The Hunger Games” soundtrack, a proto-”Folklore” ballad that happens to be my favorite song from her entire catalog. And she was shortlisted in the Oscar category before, as recently as 2022, with the song “Carolina” written for “Where the Crawdads Sing.” That finally earned her an invitation to the Academy’s Music Branch the following year.

At the moment, Swift is undeniably the Best Original Song frontrunner because there hasn’t been another song written for a film with the same impact so far this year. For example, though Oscar-winning Lady Gaga can boast that she has two songs interwoven with the plot of “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” neither track even made it into the Top 40. Charli XCX’s “Wuthering Heights” soundtrack is becoming an afterthought amid her upcoming summer album. And it doesn’t look like there are any big original musicals on the horizon this year either, though Jesse Eisenberg, coming off of his Oscar-winning film “A Real Pain,” could be in a great position to have a song from his new project, “The Debut,” do well.

But Swift has had enough Best Original Song attempts to know that her star power does not have as much influence over the Music Branch as the outside world thinks. If voters were that worried about getting stars to perform at the Oscars, then they would’ve nominated the Ariana Grande song from “Wicked: For Good” or the Miley Cyrus song from “Avatar: Fire and Ash” from last year, for example.

There are six more months left in 2026, which means plenty more room for another artist/director collaboration more meaningfully used within a film to catch voters’ attention. We cannot yet say this will be a cakewalk for Swift, given what we know about the dynamics of the Best Original Song category itself.