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Pizza guy on Oscar delivery: ‘This is really the American dream’

Posted at 9:23 AM, Mar 04, 2014
and last updated 2014-03-04 09:23:44-05

(CNN) — If he looked gobstruck when he walked onstage at the Oscars, he had good reason.

Edgar Martirosyan, who might now be the world’s most famous pizza deliveryman, had no clue he’d be serving Hollywood’s biggest stars Sunday night.

He thought the pies were for a group of writers at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. When he got there, he was told to wait.

Then Ellen DeGeneres, who hosted the Academy Awards, came backstage and asked her to follow him.

“I didn’t know,” he told CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” Monday. “I was just shocked. It was a really great moment.”

And there he was, in front millions of TV viewers, delivering pizzas from his store’s red and yellow boxes to the likes of Brad Pitt and Jared Leto.

Martirosyan, the owner of Big Mama’s and Papa’s Pizzeria, said he was most excited to see actress Julia Roberts.

Since then, friends from all over the world have called to congratulate him.

“I’m thinking that’s when you say American dream, this is really the American dream,” Martirosyan said.

The 20-location chain is now doing killer business.

“All of our locations are crazy busy right now,” owner Ararat Agakhanyan told the Los Angeles Times. “We had no idea that our pizzas were going to be on TV. We’re ordering supplies like mad, stocking up on cheese, pepperoni, sausage and boxes and shipping them out to the different stores.”

Earlier Monday, Martirosyan appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

She’d passed around a hat at the Oscars to take up a collection for his tip and gave Martirosyan a whopping $1,000 on her show Monday.

“It was really crazy for me,” he said about the whole experience.

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