That's Entertainment!: Ronni Chasen's murder shocks Hollywood

From today's issue of The Daily Gamecock. Article by Jimmy Gilmore, Property The Daily Gamecock

The Oscar race is many things. It is about the statue, about the prestige, about rooting for the underdog, about championing the personal favorite. Almost above all else though, it is about strategy.
While few outside the film industry and its close followers would ever notice, the campaign to win an Academy Award takes many different forms, employs many different tactics and overall tries to convince a voting body of over 5,000 that your candidate is the right candidate, for whatever reason.
Few were able to understand that landscape and the subtle ways it could be pulled ever so slightly in a candidate's favor like Ronni Chasen, one of the most revered publicists in the tricky world of the Oscars. Last week, Chasen, 64, was fatally shot while driving through Beverly Hills.

Over the past week, the kind of outpouring of emotions about Chasen and her work have been, to say the least, staggering. From big papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter down to the more recognized Oscar blogs like Awards Daily, writers and commentators have not held back from their tributes, anecdotes and memorials.
The publicist behind such Best Picture campaigns as 1989's "Driving Miss Daisy" and 2008's "Slumdog Millionaire," her clients included Best Supporting Actor candidate Michael Douglas and composer Hans Zimmer.
There is an accepted narrative of Hollywood around the three-month stretch of the Academy Awards, where the industry is regularly painted as cold, impersonal and narcissistic – devoting all its extra marketing money and energy toward convincing the "crotchety" Academy to vote for one person or another based on some sort of imagined criteria.
This kind of violent, inexplicable tragedy makes all of us step back, even those of us who may have never even heard of Ronni Chasen before reading this article. It makes us step back because it reveals for a brief moment part of the inner mechanization of the Hollywood Machine. It illuminates not only the people behind the race, but how the people win the race.
Most people realize that Academy Awards aren't just won by releasing movies or choosing the right release date.
They're won by successful media tours, attractive "For Your Consideration" advertisements and, above all, a good strategist.
Part of the beauty of the race is being able to follow how the race works, to see how people like Chasen tap in to the most attractive elements of any given film and pursue it from print ads to red carpets. To lose Chasen is to lose an artist, one who could help us see the beauty of a film, even if in the name of a small golden statue and the prestige that comes with it.
Watching the awards race this year, one has to wonder if the loss of Chasen will be deeply felt, or if those she taught will rise to replace her. We Oscar faithful are left not only saddened by such a violent loss of such a major personality but by the loss of a particular brand of visionary, someone who was able to set herself apart from the pack through her ability to set particular films apart from the pack.
The investigation into Chasen's murder remains ongoing, as do the outpours of support. The best people in show business live on through the mark they made, and Chasen helped define the art of the Academy Awards race. That's Entertainment.