Will Taylor Swift finally get an Oscar nom for Best Original Song?

It has been a banner six months for pop superstar Taylor Swift. In August she made history at the VMAs by becoming the first artist to win Video of the Year thrice — and the first to win the award for a self-directed video. In October, the release of her 10th studio album “Midnights” shattered records; it became Spotify’s most-streamed album in one day, sold over a million copies in the US in the first week (making Swift the only act to have accomplished this feat five times), debuted atop the Billboard 200 (tying Barbra Streisand for the most number-one albums by a woman), and occupied the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart (a first in the chart’s history).

The following month she added four more Grammy nominations to her tally, including Song of the Year for her magnum opus “ATWTMVTVFTV” — that’s “All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” for you non-Swifties — and Best Music Video for its short film. She also broke the record for the most concert tickets sold by an artist in a single day for her sixth headlining concert tour, the Eras Tour. And it was announced that Swift has penned and will direct a feature film for Searchlight. Her annus mirabilis ended with an early Christmas present in the form of inclusion on the shortlist for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Will she finally be nominated for that award for the first time?

Miss Americana is no stranger to composing music for movies. Throughout her career, she has written 10 songs included on film soundtracks. Her first foray into cinema was in 2009; that year, she co-wrote two songs featured on the soundtrack for “Hannah Montana: The Movie”: “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home” and “Crazier.” The former was one of the 63 songs in Oscar contention that year, though it was ultimately not nominated for the award; the latter was ineligible, however, as it was not written specifically for the film. The succeeding year Swift starred in her debut film, “Valentine’s Day,” for which she proffered “Today Was a Fairytale” for the soundtrack, though, as it had been written two years prior and not specifically for the film, it too was ineligible.

In 2012 Swift wrote two original songs for “The Hunger Games”: “Eyes Open” and “Safe and Sound.” The former was not included in the film itself, just the soundtrack, making it ineligible for Best Original Song, but the latter was featured in the closing credits and received a Golden Globe nomination as well as a Grammy win for Best Visual Media Song, and it previewed the sound we’d hear more of on Swift’s two best albums years later, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” However, the academy controversially disqualified the song from consideration due to a technicality, ruling that with it being the second song in the closing credits, it didn’t qualify.

Thus began a series of Swift snubs, with her Golden Globe-nominated “Sweeter than Fiction” from “One Chance” (2013) and her Grammy-nominated collab with Zayn, “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” from “Fifty Shades Darker” (2017), being left off the list of nominees in their respective years. In 2018 the music branch of the academy introduced shortlists for the awards categories they oversee (Original Score and Original Song), with the eventual five nominees deriving from the 15 entries on the preliminary list. But the branch didn’t even include her next two cinematic efforts — the Golden Globe and Grammy-nominated “Beautiful Ghosts” from the 2019 musical “Cats” and “Only the Young” from the subsequent year’s Netflix documentary “Miss Americana” — in the group of 15.

But this year, for the first time, Swift made the shortlist for her song “Carolina,” written for the film adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing.” Furthermore, she received additional Golden Globe and Grammy nominations for it and even received her first nomination from the Critics Choice Awards. As of this writing she is higher than she has ever been in the odds for the Original Song Oscar category, only one spot shy of the predicted five. So despite the her being overlooked in the Best Live Action Short Film race for her aforementioned short film of “All Too Well,” her chances for Oscar glory are still alive, now arguably more than ever.

But this year, for the first time, Swift made the shortlist for her song “Carolina,” written for the film adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing.” Furthermore, she received additional Golden Globe and Grammy nominations for it and even received her first nomination from the Critics Choice Awards. As of this writing she is higher than she has ever been in the odds for the Original Song Oscar category, only one spot shy of the predicted five. So despite the her being overlooked in the Best Live Action Short Film race for her aforementioned short film of “All Too Well,” her chances for Oscar glory are still alive, now arguably more than ever.