Miley Cyrus' song for Avatar: Fire and Ash could see her nominated for her first Oscar. "Dream as One", which plays over the third Avatar film's credits, is on the shortlist for Best Original Song along with 14 other contenders, so "Academy Award Winner Miley Cyrus" is a real possibility.
And while "Dream as One" is for James Cameron's sci-fi franchise about blue aliens, ecology, and colonization, the song has a very personal meaning to Cyrus. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, the singer shared that she was inspired by the loss of her Malibu home to the Woolsey wildfire in 2018.
"The theme of fire and ash, obviously for the kind of literal reasons of losing my house, rebuilding, growing from the ground up, and this phoenix resilience and courage to keep going," Cyrus said of how the song connects to her own life. "But also not doing it alone, to kind of reach out and ask for help from the people around you that care."
Cyrus noted that the first line in the song is pulled directly from her experience with losing her home.
"[Co-writer] Mark Ronson goes, 'What do you mean "diamonds in the dark"?' And I was like, 'Well, I lost my house in the fire, and when I went back, we had nothing, but I started scraping around in the ashes and I found one of my diamond rings.' He was going, 'That's kind of a lyric that would never happen, "a diamond in the dark."' I was like, 'That happened to me. I literally found a diamond in the dark.'"
The 33-year-old added that because she thinks "Avatar can lean more masculine feeling" she wanted to bring a "feminine approach" and "something really vulnerable" with the song.
While the fire was devastating for Cyrus and her ex Liam Hemsworth, with whom she shared the home, she later called losing her house "the biggest blessing."
At a screening of her visual album Something Beautiful in May, she explained (via People), "Losing everything and being able to rebuild, and to be able to be purposeful and choose every piece that I'm gonna collect or also just about the people in my life."
Cyrus continued, "And I guess for me, when my house burned down, a lot of my relationships also burned down, and that again just led me to such magic and to have so much gratitude."
Now, her soundtrack song is part of that rebuilding. As she said when she announced the collaboration in October, "Having been personally affected by fire and being rebuilt from the ashes, this project holds profound meaning for me. Thank you, Jim, for the opportunity to turn that experience into musical medicine. The film’s themes of unity, healing, and love resonate deeply within my soul, and to be even a small star in the universe the Avatar family has created is truly a dream come true."