YMMV / Argo

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: At the end of the film, Tony's son has a Boba Fett doll in his room amidst other sci-fi action figures and toys. Boba Fett made his first appearance in The Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978 and the doll was indeed available in 1979, prior to the release of The Empire Strikes Back in May 1980.
• Americans Hate Tingle:
  • The film was a major box office success in the US and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but was not well-liked in Canada due to the large number of inaccuracies made to the story to make the Americans out to be the sole heroes of the rescue (according to the former Canadian ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor, who was involved with the actual rescue, the Americans only did about 10% of the work while Canada handled the lion's share of what went on). The film even got such a poor reception at the Toronto Film Festival that Ben Affleck had to go back and recut some of the film (less than a month before opening) to portray the Canadians more fairly.
  • Iran also expressed anger at the film winning an award, though considering the subject matter that's not really a surprise.
  • New Zealand's parliament went as far as to pass a motion in their House of Representatives applauding the efforts of their diplomats (who aided the Americans in transportation to the airport and coached the Americans on their roles) while decrying the falsehoods presented in the movie.
• Award Snub: Ben Affleck wasn't even nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. What's extremely jarring is the fact that Affleck completed a sweep of the top prizes of all of the season's major precursor awards: he won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Picture (and Best Director), the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture-Drama (and Best Director), the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Produced Picture, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble, the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Director, and the BAFTA Award for Best Film and Best Director. All these wins were supposed to position Affleck as the favorite for the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars (and Argo won the former) and yet he didn't even receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director. Even Oscars host Seth MacFarlane made a joke about it during the ceremony: "Argo tells the previously classified story about an American hostage rescue in post-revolutionary Iran. The story was so top secret that the film’s director is unknown to the Academy."
  • The film's Best Picture win marks the first time since 1989, when Driving Miss Daisy won top honors, that the director of the Best Picture winner wasn't nominated for Best Director. Though it was much less egregious in that case because Bruce Beresford hadn't won any awards for directing that movie; indeed, he was barely nominated for anything at all. And the fact that Driving Miss Daisy became an unpopular choice for Best Picture fairly quickly afterwards (having beaten My Left Foot, Born on the Fourth of July, and Do the Right Thing, which itself didn't get a nomination) makes it less of a snub.
  • Quentin Tarantino, whose Django Unchained was nominated for Best Picture while he was also passed over for a Best Director nod (though he did win Best Original Screenplay, his second win in that category after Pulp Fiction), said he thought Affleck's omission was a bigger oversight by the Academy than his own.
  • At the very least, since Affleck was also one of the producers of the movie, he still managed to win an Oscar for his work on the film, even delivering the speech to close the night. He even made a joke about it, pointing out, "I didn't get nominated for Best Actor either, but nobody's saying I got robbed there."
• Questionable Casting: Though Ben Affleck's performance was hailed by critics for his realistic demeanor as a spy, the real Tony Mendez had dark skin, dark hair, was average height, had ordinary features, and a normal build. In short he could blend in almost anywhere in the world as the kind of person nobody would notice. Ben Affleck is quite tall and very handsome, the kind of person that easily sticks out in a crowd.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Taylor Schilling, who appears very briefly as Tony Mendez's wife, would go on to gain great acclaim as the lead of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black.
  • Ray Porter went from a small role in this to playing the Greater-Scope Villain of another film starring Ben Affleck, that being Zack Snyder's Justice League as Darkseid.

---