Blake Lively’s Cannes Film Festival is turning out to be very…lively.
The 28-year-old actress and model has already been caught in Ronan Farrow’s firing line for choosing to star in his father Woody Allen’s new film Cafe Society, which opened Cannes, and has had the size of her baby bump scrutinized. (Lively is expecting her second child with actor husband Ryan Reynolds later this year).
More: The Farrow’s Family Strategic Takedown of Woody Allen
Now Lively is under fire for posting Instagram pictures of herself front-and-back posing on the Cannes red carpet. Alluding to her ample derriere, Lively wrote: “L.A. face with an Oakland booty.”
The problem? Lively’s pop culture-tinged selfie showcasing her posterior directly quotes a line from Baby Got Back, black rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 cult homage to huge derrieres.
The post enraged left-wing culture warriors who accused Lively of racial insensitivity and culturally appropriating black women’s bodies.
Has Blake Lively even been to Oakland??
— O Shit Waddup (@HellaBootsy) May 18, 2016
Another day, another rich white woman using WOC’s bodies as a punchline and commodity. As if Blake Lively wasn’t the worst already.
— Kat Bee (@katbeee) May 18, 2016
While Lively’s acting career has been bland and choosy since she left Gossip Girl, with roles in The Green Lantern and The Age of Adaline, away from her profession it’s been a different story.
There was the fact she married Deadpool actor Reynolds at South Carolina’s Boone Hall Plantation, an operation that once took advantage of slave labor pre–Civil War.
THEORY: Beige Lively’s publicist told her to post that Instagram so as to distract from the limp Woody Allen defense from last week
— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) May 18, 2016
Then there was the collapse of her lifestyle site Preserve last September. Lively’s answer to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company lasted barely more than a year, and she shut it down for “not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way.”
But Preserve was around long enough for Lively to find herself caught up in another race row when the site published a fashion editorial that she herself styled, entitled “Allure of the Antebellum.” Detractors felt it glorified the pre-Civil War South too much for comfort.
Lively has not responded to the criticism and not deleted the Instragram post. Perhaps she’s taking her own advice regarding a much less controversial music reference she made when commenting on Preserve shuttering: “I’ve asked my husband to just play Shake It Off on a loop.’ “
