- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The scene where Don is nearly arrested for having a public rendezvous with another man at a pool. It happens suddenly, contributes very little to the overall plot, and is never referenced again.
- Critical Backlash: The Hype Backlash this film underwent caused a smaller backlash to pop up, with some people defending it as a good film despite its controversies and criticisms.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Rather unexpectedly, the film was a major success in China.
- Hype Backlash: Easily the most notorious case in the Best Picture category since The King's Speech, and possibly even since Crash. At first, the film was mostly seen as the usual inoffensive Civil Rights Movement period drama, but once it started racking up more accolades awards-wise, an increasingly vocal negative response built gradually on social media for perceived White Man's Burden elements, liberties taken with historical facts, and co-writer Nick Vallelonga's history of promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric. Then, almost immediately after the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Los Angeles Times published an article
decrying its win. And this is before factoring in this film's Fandom Rivalry with other nominees: Roma, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, A Star Is Born (2018), Black Panther (2018), Bohemian Rhapsody, and Vice (2018). - Memetic Mutation:
- Quite a few people at the Oscars were visibly unhappy at its success, resulting in many meme-able images. Perhaps the biggest is Spike Lee cradling his chin over brass knuckles that say "hate."◊
- Tied to its win at the Oscars, the film is sometimes called Miss Daisy Driving as it's something of a flip of that movie, which also happened to beat out a Spike Lee movie for Best Picture.
- Quite a few people at the Oscars were visibly unhappy at its success, resulting in many meme-able images. Perhaps the biggest is Spike Lee cradling his chin over brass knuckles that say "hate."
- Overshadowed by Controversy: The film's co-writer and son of its lead character Nick Vallelonga was discovered to have propped up Donald Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric during his presidential campaign on Twitter, claiming that he'd seen Muslims celebrating the September 11th attacks. Given that Mahershala Ali is Muslim, it just makes the whole thing even more awkward, if not even Harsher in Hindsight given the film obviously intended an anti-bigotry stance.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Dr. Don Shirley is meant to come across as sympathetic due to being estranged from both black people (because of his privileged status) and white people (because of white people's prejudices), and that his reasoning for touring the Deep South is because he thinks that it is useful to change white people's minds about black people. However, his haughty and moralizing attitude can be off-putting to some viewers as he continues to treat Tony with some disdain, remains distant with fellow African Americansnote , regularly puts himself into dangerous situations by arrogantly assuming access to whites-only establishments, and getting nearly arrested for having a public rendezvous with another man at a pool. When Tony has to bail him out of the latter situation by bribing some cops, Don doesn't even thank him, but accuses him of only "rewarding their behaviour" and only thinking of himself, which Tony calls him an Ungrateful Bastard and warning him again not to wander off without him.
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