This year’s Oscar race for Best Actress has narrowed down to two fierce combatants: Demi Moore for her career-reviving role as an aged-out aerobics TV show host in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance vs. Mikey Madison for her career-making role as a wronged erotic dancer in Sean Baker’s Anora. Thankfully, they’re both great performances in great movies, but since this is Awards Season, they share a combined running time of 280 minutes, which is a lot of homework to squeeze in before this Sunday’s ceremony if you’ve fallen behind on the syllabus. So, at this point it’s probably best recommended to watch the one title that combines those two flavors in one easy-to-swallow, two-hour treat. 1996’s Striptease stars Demi Moore in a career-pinnacle role as a wronged erotic dancer, lacing up her stripper boots and spinning the poles years before Mikey Madison was born. It’s got none of The Substance‘s gross-out humor nor any of Anora‘s violent despair, but it does find the exact Venn-Diagram overlap where Moore & Madison’s awards-season spotlights currently intersect. It’s also, on its own terms, a total hoot.

Released just one year after Paul Verhoeven’s vicious camp classic Showgirls, Striptease is mostly remembered as a hollow echo of one of the great erotic thrillers of its era. Despite their shared strip club setting, the two movies are wildly different in tone & intent, which makes Striptease‘s lighter, fluffier approach hugely beneficial in retrospect. It’s shockingly cute & playful for its scummy setting—populated with perverted Congressmen & gropey strip club patrons—ultimately playing more like a precursor for Miss Congeniality than an echo of Showgirls. Like Madison in Anora, Moore stars as an erotic dancer who has to chase down her fuckboy ex to get what’s owed to her (in this case, custody of her young daughter) while suffering a series of screwball hijinks that are tonally incongruent with the violence threatened by the crime-world goons circling around her. Moore was no young upstart ingénue at the time of filming, though. Her performance was the highest paid actress gig in Hollywood history at the point of paycheck, and she deserved every penny. Unfortunately and unfairly, it was also the start of her professional decline that hadn’t fully recovered until this year’s Oscar campaign, three decades later.

On a technical level, Striptease excels foremost as a feat of mainstream screenwriting. In an opening scene that lasts less than a minute, we’re introduced to Demi Moore in a Floridian divorce court, pleading to a good-old-boy judge not to grant custody of her daughter to her pill-head ex (Robert Patrick), whose flagrant criminality caused her to lose her job as a secretary for the FBI. That’s some incredible efficiency. From there, we immediately jump eight weeks into her new career as the rising-star dancer at The Eager Beaver, a humble strip club that struggles to match the class-standard set by its better-funded rival, The Flesh Farm. In that club, Moore exclusively strips to Annie Lennox tunes in absurdly athletic, MTV-style strip routines that recall Adrian Lynne’s girl-on-the-go 80s classic Flashdance . . . with a lot more nudity. She also makes fast friends with a cast of adorable fellow dancers and their living-cartoon bodyguard, played by Ving Rhames in what might be his career-funniest performance. Every exchange between Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff is genuinely, warmly funny and hints to a screenplay that was refined trough several joke punch-ups by screenwriter-turned-director Andrew Bergman. That affable tone then goes a long way to soften the thriller elements that threaten to sour the good mood but never can, not in a movie where Ving Rhames trades quips with a pet monkey in perfect deadpan.

Burt Reynolds anchors the serious end of the plot in a deeply unserious role as a drunken lush Congressman with a panty fetish, who is so obsessed with Moore’s rising-star dancer that he at one point douses himself in Vaseline and huffs her dryer lint just to feel close to her. The role perfectly completes the comedic pervert trifecta established by his more celebrated parts in Boogie Nights & The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, balancing out the thriller requirements of his character with some vintage kinky kitsch. Because the Congressman is so obviously, publicly horny for Moore, his staff has to clean up the trail of witnesses to his depravity with murderous violence, which escalates the stakes of Moore’s custody struggles. To the Right-Wing Christian voter base, he’s a God-fearing soldier of Christ who uses his office to uphold Family Values in the Deep South. To anyone who’s ever been alone with him, he’s a dangerously horny freak with no functional sense of interpersonal decorum, a total menace. Meanwhile, Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff are portrayed as adorable women struggling to make do with “honest work.” Sure, a couple of them have the largest breast implants you’ll ever see outside of a Russ Meyer film, but they’re truly a wholesome bunch who love & support each other. It’s really very sweet, especially in comparison with the sleazy lawyers, politicians, and fixers in their orbit.

Demi Moore is more widely beloved for earlier 90s classics like Indecent Proposal & Ghost, but Striptease might be the best total-package encapsulation of what makes her great. She’s funny, she’s relatable, and she’s an exquisitely sculpted physical specimen that defies the usual limitations of the human body. A lot of the subtext of her role in The Substance relies on the audience’s understanding that she is a perfectly calibrated Hollywood actress who is still made to feel like she’s not living up to the impossible, illusionary standard set by her industry; Striptease puts her body on display in the same way, which had to have been a vulnerable act even at the height of her star power. The main struggle of Mikey Madison’s Oscar campaign this year is that she doesn’t have that built-in rapport with her audience, since she’s really just getting started. Her body is also being ogled in her star-making role, though, so it would be great to see her compare notes with Moore in a dual interview discussing what it’s like to work a stripper pole on a 50-foot movie screen with nowhere to hide from strangers’ eyes. You’d think that, because of the time of its release, Striptease would’ve been a lot more dismissive or gross about Moore’s fictional dancer than Anora was about Madison’s, but that’s really not the case. The two women were both given a chance to play these vulnerable, wronged sex workers with full heart, humor, and humanity, sidestepping the nastier, scuzzier tropes typically associated with the archetype. And they were both great at it.

-Brandon Ledet