Ariana DeBose responds to all the memes about her widely mocked Baftas performance

Oscar-winning actor and singer Ariana DeBose has broken her silence about the mockery and memes that her performance at the Baftas spawned on Sunday.

The 32-year-old star opened up the ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall with a medley in tribute to all the women that were nominated for awards on the night.

The song started with a rendition of 'Sisters are Doing it For Themselves' and finished with 'We Are Family.'

However, the bit in between is what generated the most interest where, a clearly breathless DeBose, who had just performed an intricate dance routine, attempted to rap all of the candidate's names in just 45 seconds.

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DeBose managed to name-check the likes of Ana DeArmas, Emma Thompson and Michelle Yeoh (to mixed responses) but the line 'Angela Bassett did the thing' followed by 'Viola Davis, my Woman King' is what has sparked the most joy and hilarity.

Within hours countless memes had landed on Twitter about DeBose, with the Angela Bassett line proving to be the most popular.

DeBose has deleted her Twitter account in the aftermath, with Baftas producer Nick Bullen calling the criticism "incredibly unfair." Bullen added: "We wanted to open the show with some energy, some fun, and also lay out straight away that this was hopefully going to feel like a different night, but with a familiarity as well, and what Ariana did was exactly that."

However, despite deleting her Twitter, DeBose does appear to have enjoyed some of the memes about her performance. On Instagram, writer and editor Evan Ross Katz shared a bunch of the memes with the West Side Story actor herself commenting: "Honestly I love this."

Alls well that ends well then...

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