Lainey Wilson on potential Oscar nomination for ‘Twisters’ song: ‘Gives me all the feels’
Lainey Wilson has been on a winning streak over the last three years. It started in 2022 when the country singer-songwriter claimed New Female Artist of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards, and then New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards a few months later. By 2024 she had won Entertainer of the Year at both ceremonies, a remarkably quick ascent. Now, she has made the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song for “Out of Oklahoma” from Twisters, which she cowrote with Luke Dick and Shane McAnally.
“Oh my goodness,” Wilson tells Gold Derby about the prospect of becoming an Oscar nominee (watch our complete interview above). “Just that sentence right there just gave me all the feels. You know, all I’ve ever wanted to do is sing and write music and tell stories, and it’s just really cool to see all the opportunities that have come just from this dream that I had. I was a 9-year-old little girl writing and just trying to tell stories to anybody who would listen. It’s cool that I’m able to share my gift and possibly have the opportunity to be nominated for an Oscar. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the sound of that.”
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A nomination for “Out of Oklahoma” would be especially meaningful for “the country music community. Country music is definitely having its moment right now, and I’m very proud to be a part of that movement,” she says. “I feel like when you listen to all the country songs right now everybody looks different and sounds different and comes from a different walk of life and has a different journey.” She imagines “all these little boys and little girls tuning in and watching” a country performance at the Oscars “and being like, this girl came from a town of 180 people and followed her dreams and didn’t let anything stand in her way. … That’d be pretty cool.”
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Wilson got the call in January 2024: “They said, we’re looking to do the Twisters soundtrack, and we want the entire soundtrack to be country. And my ears perked up. … Once they went down the list of all the names that they were interested in having be a part of the soundtrack, I was like, wow, if they can pull this off, this is really going to be something cool to be a part of.” She was flown to Los Angeles to watch a scene from the film of Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) returning home to Oklahoma, “and they said, do you think that you could write something that really captures the emotion and the feeling that Kate’s having on her ride home? I felt myself in Kate. I felt like it was really easy for me to be able to step into her shoes and write from that perspective because I feel like I have felt a lot of the things that Kate has felt herself.”
SEEBox office: ‘Twisters’ spins into theaters well ahead of projections with $80.5 million
When it came to reaching out to her co-writers, she knew that Grammy nominee Dick and Grammy winner McAnally could help her accomplish the task. “If you say, hey, I want you to write about this Apple computer right here, they are able to step into the shoes of that Apple computer and write everything that it’s feeling. … The day we sat down to write ‘Out of Oklahoma’ we knew what the song was called. We had seen the scene from the movie. Now we were like, okay, we just cannot let this scene down. The scene was so powerful … and we knew the emotions that we needed to bring to it. So we fought for it. We fought for every line. We fought for every syllable,” and when they presented the finished product to the Twisters team, “we got it on the first try.”
At this point, Wilson is already an awards show veteran, not just as a performer and a winner, but as a host. She emceed the CMA Awards last fall with Peyton Manning and Luke Bryan, “and so I knew that they were going to give me a run for my money, but I was going to give them a run for their money too. And it was great. I felt like our personalities just kind of bounced off of each other.” To upcoming Oscars host Conan O’Brien she suggests, “Make sure your vision’s good when you’re getting ready to read the teleprompters. I had to go get LASIK surgery after that.” Also, “you don’t want to mispronounce somebody’s name. That’s awful.” But most importantly, “take a deep breath. At the end of the day it’s just a big old celebration anyway. Everybody that’s there is there to enjoy their night. And everybody watching wants to feel like they’re a part of it. So just invite everybody in. Invite everybody into your space and let your hair down.”
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