YMMV / Ordinary People

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• Adorkable: Jeannine in the film. Also Conrad to a certain extent.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: So many people react differently to the character of Beth. Some look at her as a self-centered and insensitive jerk that never even loved her husband or Conrad. To others she is a Jerkass Woobie as you can understand that she is ultimately a weak person who could not deal with trauma and is in constant self-denial of how she needs help and needs to help others.
• Award Snub:
  • Along with films such as How Green Was My Valley, The Greatest Show on Earth and Crash, this film is one of the most notorious beneficiaries/inversions of the trope. Put simply, quite a few folks believe 1980 should have been the year of Raging Bull and Martin Scorsese. At least in this case, Raging Bull's failure to win is easily understood: UA was going down the tubes financially following Heaven's Gate and was unable to promote it to Oscar voters. Plenty of people (like Roger Ebert) thought both films were exceptional. Scorsese himself loved Ordinary People and had no hard feelings against its win.
  • Donald Sutherland was the only one of the four principal stars to not get an Academy Award nomination; some people believe he very much deserved it.
  • Many felt that Mary Tyler Moore should have won Best Actress over Sissy Spacek's Oscar Bait performance in Coal Miner's Daughter.
  • The movie snubbed itself with the infamous decision to put Timothy Hutton in the supporting actor category, despite his character obviously being a lead. The decision, mostly believed to be because Hutton had no chance against De Niro, swiped Judd Hirsch of what many felt was his Oscar.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: A bunch of guys wander around singing the McDonald's jingle of the era. Made into something of a plot point, as they wreck an emotional moment between Conrad and Jeannine.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Try listening to Pachelbel's Canon after seeing the film and not have it completely associated with the music.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Mary Tyler Moore's own son Richie shot himself three weeks after the film's release. He was reportedly very troubled, but the police ruled it an "accident" — the gun model involved was later taken off the market for its "hair trigger". Like with her character, this was a significant factor in the disintegration of her marriage the year after.
• Tough Act to Follow: Ordinary People was Judith Guest's first novel and the first book her publisher, Viking, had published from an unsolicited manuscript in more than two decades. Guest has written four books since, none of which have had the impact or popularity of her debut.
• The Woobie: Everyone, but Conrad takes the grand prize.

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