He's cleaning up in the pre-Oscar award blitz and hotly tipped to win a second Best Actor Oscar next month - indeed, if the show goes on as the writer's strike has already put the kibosh on the Golden Globes - but Daniel Day Lewis, English-born but Irish to the core, is taking it all in his stride. Day Lewis was in Santa Monica on Monday night to collect his first gong of the season, top actor honors at the Critics' Choice Awards for his star turn in "There Will Be Blood." But one gets the feeling that the low-key star would just as soon stay at home in Co. Wicklow with his wife and two sons than walk the red carpets in Hollywood. In all the rounds of interviews he's done for "Blood," Day Lewis has proudly spoken of his love for Ireland, where he's lived for 10 years. "From the day we arrived here, my sense of Ireland's importance has never diminished. Just the sound of the west of Ireland in a person's voice can affect me deeply," said Day Lewis, as quoted in Ireland's Sunday Independent. "But, truly, there's a quality of wildness that exists in Ireland that coincides with utter solitude. This place has always contained the spell for me." The reclusive actor, who completely shies away from any kind of media intrusion when he's not working, began traveling to Ireland when he was four years old, thanks to his dad Cecil Day Lewis, the Nobel winning poet who was born in Co. Laois. "Yes, it's my home," Day Lewis told London's Time Out. "That's where the family is and the boys are in school there, but I have no illusion about the fact that I'm an Englishman living in Ireland. Even though I do straddle both worlds and I'm very proud to be able to carry both passports." Not that Day Lewis, whose wife Rebecca Miller is the daughter of the late, great playwright Arthur Miller, is for a moment forgetful that he's English by birth "I do know where I come from. I particularly miss south-east London - the frontlines of Deptford and Lewisham and New Cross and Charlton - because that's my patch," he says. "But maybe I have a rather sentimental relationship to it. The sort that exiles tend to have."