Taylor Swift has already built the kind of awards résumé most artists would spend a lifetime chasing, with 14 Grammy wins, including a record four Album of the Year victories. Her Oscar journey has been quieter, but 'Carolina' earned a place on the 2023 Academy shortlist, helping lead to her invitation to the Academy’s Music Branch. Now, with ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ from Toy Story 5, another awards season door appears to be opening.

The interesting part is that Swift may have arrived at the Oscar race with almost every ingredient already on the table, except the one the Academy tends to taste first.

IndieWire is already calling Taylor Swift’s ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ the Best Original Song frontrunner, pointing to a combination that is difficult for the Academy to ignore. Toy Story 5 has become a major box-office force, while Swift’s song has achieved enormous commercial visibility. Yet the outlet notes one curious weakness after examining how the song functions inside the movie. It plays over the end credits rather than becoming part of the narrative itself.

If one follows IndieWire's trail, the Academy has also made its position on end-credit songs clearer for the 99th Oscars, requiring the submission clip for a song that begins as the first new music cue in the credits to include the final 15 seconds before the credits roll. The Academy rules state that Original Song achievements are judged for their effectiveness, craftsmanship, creative substance and relevance to the dramatic whole, specifically as presented within the motion picture. Swift’s track may lyrically echo the emotional destination of Toy Story 5, but it does not get the kind of narrative spotlight that once made ‘When She Loved Me’ such an indelible part of Jessie’s story.

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However, this is where the Oscar race gets much more interesting.

Taylor Swift knows this particular Hollywood maze better than many people realize. ‘Safe & Sound’ from The Hunger Games showed how naturally her songwriting could inhabit cinematic storytelling, while ‘Carolina’ demonstrated that she could enter the awards conversation without leaning entirely on pop superstardom. For now, though, ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ has something its competitors are still searching for: an unmistakable footprint in the culture. 

That could prove powerful if no later contender creates a more emotionally integrated movie moment. Swift does not need the Oscar race to be a coronation yet. She simply needs the song to remain impossible to ignore while the rest of 2026 unfolds. There is still plenty of awards-season runway left, and another film could arrive with the exact narrative marriage the Academy loves.

 But right now, Swift is standing at the front of the Oscar parade, with the only real question being whether the song eventually gets to walk through the movie before it reaches the credits.

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Would ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ deserve the Oscar if it remains the year’s biggest film song? Share your thoughts in the comments.