Reports say Taylor Swift already leads the Best Original Song Oscar race

Here’s the twist behind Taylor Swift’s latest awards push: “I Knew It, I Knew You”, her new track for Toy Story 5, plays over the end credits — not inside the movie itself — even as it storms the culture and caps one of the year’s biggest box-office runs. That placement is the one soft spot observers keep circling while they also call the song a frontrunner.

IndieWire has already pegged the track as the Best Original Song favorite, pointing to a one-two punch that’s hard to beat: a Pixar juggernaut in theaters and a single with massive visibility. Swift arrives with the kind of résumé the music branch can’t miss — 14 Grammys, including a record four Album of the Year wins — plus a recent foothold in Oscar world after “Carolina” landed on the Academy’s 2023 shortlist and she was invited into the Academy’s Music Branch.

The end-credits hurdle

Where things get tricky is how the Academy says it evaluates songs. Its rules emphasize “effectiveness, craftsmanship, creative substance and relevance to the dramatic whole,” specifically as the song appears in a film. That’s why end-credit placements are often scrutinized: they can echo a movie’s emotions without shaping a scene the way a truly woven-in musical moment does.

• What’s working for Swift: Toy Story 5 is a box-office powerhouse, and the single has a huge cultural footprint.
• What gives voters pause: the track begins as the credits roll, not in a key narrative beat.
• Why that matters: the Academy spotlights how a song functions inside the film, not just how big it is outside of it.
• The wild card: if no later 2026 release delivers a more emotionally integrated “movie moment,” the scale could stay tipped toward Swift.

Swift’s film songwriting playbook is deeper than many casual viewers realize. “Safe & Sound” (from The Hunger Games) showed how easily her writing can live inside a story’s tone, and “Carolina” (from Where the Crawdads Sing) proved she can enter an awards conversation with something mood-driven and restrained, not just pop-star wattage. Those tracks helped set the stage for a bid like this one, where her name recognition meets a franchise with generational reach.

Pixar history also looms over the conversation. Fans still tie Toy Story to the way “When She Loved Me” was braided into Jessie’s backstory in Toy Story 2 — the kind of in-movie showcase that becomes inseparable from the character. By contrast, “I Knew It, I Knew You” mirrors Toy Story 5’s emotional destination after the story ends, which may make its case feel more like a powerful coda than a turning point.

The song begins over the end credits of Toy Story 5, not within the narrative.

IndieWire notes the Academy has even clarified how to judge that exact scenario heading into the 99th Oscars : for songs that start as the first new cue in the end credits, the required submission clip must include the final 15 seconds before the credits appear — a small but telling reminder that voters are asked to weigh what the music does on screen, not just on the charts.