No taking it back now, y’all. Cha Cha Real Smooth has won the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival Awards. The comedy, one of the 18 movies we were excited about seeing at Sundance this year, stars writer-director Cooper Raiff as a recent college grad named Andrew who is adjusting to a new bar-mitzvah party-starting gig. In other words, he’s teaching a bunch of teens the “Cha Cha Slide.” Producer and potential coffee-shop gatekeeper Dakota Johnson plays a woman named Domino, whom Andrew meets along with her autistic daughter (Vanessa Burghardt). This year’s ceremony was presented virtually over Twitter, and Raiff and Johnson accepted their award while wearing matching Cha Cha hats. Apple TV+ bought the movie for $15 million — not quite the record-setting $25 million it shelled out for CODA last year, but still a hefty sum. Among the full list of winners, other films that won top prizes this year included Nanny (Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Dramatic), The Exiles (Grand Jury Prize, U.S. Documentary), and Navalny (Festival Favorite Award and Audience Award, U.S. Documentary).
